‘But at least they’re reading’: we’ve all heard that argument, most recently with the launch of the latest Harry Potter novel, which is also set in a school environment and also involves a number of literary set pieces based around sporting matches. The argument usually goes that reading – any reading – is somehow good for children and that once they achieve a level of comfort with one type of text they will naturally turn to different and more difficult texts. This is hopeful, rather than reflective, thinking. Comfort reading is like comfort eating: a pattern that is easily established and immensely difficult to break.

Black Dog Books is putting out novels to be read once and then thrown away. This is the message sent by books whose thin storylines fail to hold for even a single read. Go the Distance (Black Dog Books, $14.95 pb, 154 pp) is the seventh book in Michael Panckridge’s The Anniversary Legends series set at Sandhurst School. A former pupil and Legends competition winner, Jennifer Kane, hosts Luci Rankin and her athletic friends on her farm and tells them of Charlie’s Challenge: a competition to sprint to the top paddock boundary in under four minutes. With this loose plot dynamic in place, there follows an encounter with sheep rustlers, a rivalry with Karla Harris and the staging of the big school competition, replete with matrix tables of the unfolding events and sporting quizzes in the appendix.

In All Stars #1: Maddy, Goal Defence (Black Dog Books, $14.95 pb, 107 pp), Meredith Costain positions a local netball team as an expression of independence against a school team with limited spaces for new girls. Instead of playing for her school, Maddy Ditchburn teams up with two friends, posts flyers and goes door knocking. She eventually puts together a six-girl team for the big match. Her single mother’s financial difficulties, and some vaguely articulated problems with her absent Dad, provide an emotional backdrop, but the real story lies in the club-forming.

Raewyn Caisley’s In Union (Lothian, $14.95 pb, 143 pp) belongs to the Lothian Sports Fiction series. Christian Philips, a maths, painting and drama student, tries out for the junior rugby team. In laboured prose, the story follows his team’s misguided application of brawn over brain. ‘Whack whack whack,whack. Both sides totally laid into each other. It was like a Monsters Inc picnic day.’ Any narrative tension splutters out under the soaking provided by Christian’s knowing authorial voice. Despite an attempt at a family drama between football fanatic Gran and Christian, the most interesting relationship in the book is the enigmatic and slightly abusive one between Coach Honsey and the spectral figure of the South African headmaster.

Specky Magee and the Boots of Glory (Penguin, $14.95 pb, 259 pp) and Jasper Zammit (Soccer Legend) #1: The Game of Life (Random House, $14.95 pb, 177 pp) are the most accomplished titles here. They are also the ones to emerge from multinational publishing houses with decent production values and sport-celebrity co-authors.

Specky Magee and the Boots of Glory, Felice Arena and Garry Lyon’s fourth book in this series, most closely follows the classic school story form. There are some familiar tropes: the new boy at school who dreams of belonging, the rite of initiation, a moral dilemma. The story begins with Specky’s arrival at Gosmore Grammar on a sporting scholarship. He’s been recruited from his beloved Booyong High to strengthen Gosmore Grammar’s team for the eponymous Boots of Glory match played against Salisbury College every twenty-five years. The initiation ritual jeopardises Specky’s scholarship, and the novel goes on to explore character where individual athleticism becomes an indicator of moral worth.

In Deborah Abela and Johnny Warren’s book, the first in a planned series, we meet the novel’s namesake in full imaginative flight. Jasper Zammit is a dreamer, too busy listening to the laudatory commentary in his head to concentrate on the game at hand. He plays for the local Under-11 Rovers, a mixed-sex community team that attracts a new girl, Lil. She is even crazier about soccer than Jasper, and knows more about it. Lil and Jasper are engaging characters. There is a well-scripted plot involving a conflict of values between Jasper’s Maltese grandfather and his own father, who resigns from work to spend more time with his family.

Sporting endeavour in the school story traditionally operates as the privileged space in which the social and personal struggles of the school-based protagonist are eventually transfigured and overcome. Generically speaking, it is an interesting development that these novels have largely jettisoned the ‘school’ part of the equation. While Specky Magee is something of an exception, overall there seems to be a collective uncertainty about what school actually is these days, beyond a series of clichés.

In sacrificing the autonomous school realm, what all five novels do is force the sporting field into relation with ‘real life’. The protagonists here, although they are all aged somewhere between seven and fourteen, already seem to be on sporting career paths or working full-time as relationship counsellors. In Jasper Zammit and Specky Magee, there are explicit attempts to replace the moral authority hitherto ascribed to the school environment with codes of discipline for soccer and Australian Rules, respectively. The late Johnny Warren opens each chapter of The Game of Life with a soccer rule or anecdote that reflects upon unfolding events. Garry Lyon interrupts the narrative of Specky Magee to impart a disorienting mixture of advice, advertisement and sporting lore. In these five books, sport is a terribly serious business. There’s not much sense of a childhood defined on its own terms.

The other problem is that the sporting match climax lends itself to lazy writing. What gets sacrificed is any commitment to real characters, drama or narrative tension. It may be comforting to read books like these, but if anyone is inspired to be an élite athlete from the content, then the chances are that, in the future, they will be writing those sporting autobiographies that include the ubiquitous ‘as told to’ line on the title page. Christmas stocking fillers? Half-time oranges would be healthier.