Mychal ‘the Librarian’ Threets embraces his passions for books and ladies’s basketball to advertise each

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While warming up for a house showdown with the Las Vegas Aces in 2024, ahead Alysha Clark couldn’t imagine who was sitting courtside.

“I stopped and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Mychal,’” stated Clark, now a member of the Dallas Wings. “That’s freaking Mychal the Librarian! I completely fangirled and ran over after the game to say hello and just tell him what an inspiration he’s been to me.”

Mychal Threets, extra generally generally known as “Mychal the Librarian,” gained an enormous following on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic by sharing movies on psychological well being, literacy, and his life as a librarian in California.

“Being able to see him [Threets] supporting us, I’m still just mind blown,” stated Alysha Clark (left), proven with Threets in 2025.Courtesy of Mychal Threets

Threets, 36, can also be a fervent follower of ladies’s basketball, a fandom that started in childhood. He incorporates his ardour into his day by day work, whether or not by celebrating books by girls athletes or recommending girls’s sports activities titles from his library days.

Though librarians and feminine athletes function in several arenas, each share a objective to encourage and empower the following era — one in all some ways Threets connects his passions.

“I’ve always loved women’s sports as much as I love libraries, as much as I love literacy and mental health,” stated Threets, who’s now host of the kids’s present Reading Rainbow. “Women’s sports are very important to me.”

Mychal Threets (left) stated he and his siblings inherited their love for ladies’s basketball from their mom, Tessa Banuelos-Threets (proper). Courtesy of Mychal Threets

Threets’ earliest basketball reminiscences stem from moments together with his mom, Tessa Banuelos-Threets, a bodily training instructor, leader, and athletic director at Buckingham Collegiate Charter Academy in Vacaville, California.

Banuelos-Threets, who will quickly enter her seventeenth year teaching the Buckingham girls’s varsity basketball roster, handed her love of ladies’s basketball to Threets and his siblings. Threets recalled watching showdown replays together with his mom — a giant UConn fan — and being uncovered to the Huskies’ storied chip dynasties.

“We would stick a VHS tape in the machine, hit record, and go to church or do whatever we were going to do, and then it was like, ‘All right, UConn is on. Everybody, gather round,’ ” Banuelos-Threets stated. “Mychal was probably like 8 or 9, so it goes way back.”

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Threets additionally credit his mom with introducing him to libraries as a baby. At the time, books about girls’s basketball, significantly ones authored by girls’s basketball figures, have been laborious to search out.

“There definitely weren’t as many as there are now,” Threets stated. “I really like that [today] A’ja Wilson is writing books. I really like that Elena Delle Donne has a sequence for teenagers. … I feel I discovered some biographies on gamers like Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes after I was a child, however not too many.

“I don’t think there was as much of an intersection [between women’s sports and books about them]. I think part of the intersection as a kid was just wishing there were more books about women’s basketball and women’s sports in general.”

The panorama for books authored by feminine athletes is altering. Recent additions embody Dear Black Girls: How to Be True to You, a memoir Wilson revealed in 2024, and Paw Paw’s Playlist, a brand new kids’s ebook Clark co-authored that helps kids navigate grief.

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Threets makes use of his platform to advertise tales informed by WNBA gamers. In 2025, he shared on social media his appreciation for Wilson’s memoir and urged his followers to learn it. Last month, Threets made a put up celebrating Clark’s new ebook as effectively.

“For him to support the book the way that he has, has been so kind and just beautiful,” Clark stated. “I’m just honored that I got to share in my author journey with him.”

Threets stated that books authored by athletes attain younger readers in a approach different authors can’t.

“When you have these superstars creating more and more stories for these kids to see and to know that anything is possible — to know that, yes, these are heroes, but they’re also human beings as well — it shows kids that they can be anything, that they can attain what their heroes have,” Threets stated.

Threets has visited a number of WNBA arenas, however he has change into a stalwart at Golden State Valkyries video games in his native Bay Area. Above: Threets (left) with then-Indiana Fever guard Aerial Powers in 2025. Below: Threets (left) and Valkyries middle Nadia Fingall. Courtesy of Mychal Threets

Courtesy of Mychal Threets

Threets wish to see extra girls’s sports activities biographies, in addition to books for early readers — and he needs to assist write them.

“I would love to be a part of writing some sort of anthology just about the different players and the different things geared towards adults and kids and teens. But I would definitely love to have them write it in their own words and to be the storytellers of their lives or their stories,” he stated. “It’s something that a lot of publishers are open to. I get to talk to different publishers and they’re big fans of women’s basketball.”

Threets has popped up at WNBA arenas across the nation, attending video games in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Because the Golden State Valkyries action in his native Bay Area, he has change into a fixture at their residence video games.

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“Secretly, I’m trying to go to all these different arenas,” stated Threets, who additionally attended the 2025 girls’s Final Four in Tampa, Florida, the place he watched UConn triumph a nationwide title.

Clark likened Threets to a “courtside king.”

“I love seeing good people celebrated, and he’s such a good human being,” Clark stated. “Being able to see him supporting us, I’m still just mind-blown. It’s been really cool.”

Threets praised WNBA gamers for traditionally taking additional steps to work together with their communities, together with selling literacy.

Threets (left) stated he loves that there are such a lot of readers within the WNBA, together with Nneka Ogwumike (proper).Courtesy of Mychal Threets

“I love that there’s so many readers in the WNBA. I meet different players who talk about libraries, who talk about literacy,” Threets stated. “I received to speak to [Los Angeles Sparks forward] Nneka Ogwumike about libraries and various things. It’s simply actually cool to see how a lot girls’s basketball gamers care a lot about studying, how a lot they care in regards to the neighborhood.

“They show up in schools. They go to libraries and they do story time. I remember seeing Jonquel Jones doing a story time at the library.”

Threets emphasised how feminine athletes empower classroom studying, displaying an unrecognized hyperlink between girls’s sports activities and educators like him.

Threets (left) with Atlanta Dream co-owner Renee Montgomery.Courtesy of Mychal Threets

“I hope they realize that libraries and schools are stepping up for them just as much. [Libraries and schools] love that there are those examples out there that they can tell their [students], ‘Hey, did you see the women’s basketball game?’” Threets stated.

“I think that’s what it is, just the opportunities for community, the opportunity for care, the opportunity to talk about things that matter on a giant level and on a small level. I think what they do is they care about children all over the world, and I think that’s what librarians like me and educators do as well. We’re all just in it just to be able to support one another, be it on a basketball court or in the library.”

Sean Hurd is a senior author for Andscape who primarily covers girls’s basketball. His athletic peak got here on the age of 10 when he was named camper of the week at a Josh Childress basketball camp.