M.K. Lever, Author of 'Surviving the Second Tier,' Featured on Parenting Aces Radio Show: Imagine a world where coercion, control, surveillance, and manipulation reign. Where imbalance of power makes exploitation easy and where those at the bottom of the heap sacrifice everything to make a profit for those at the top. M.K. Lever's knockout debut work of fiction, Surviving the Second Tier, weaves these issues and themes throughout a new fictional dystopia to display the real world truths that face athletes in the college athletic system. “I wrote this book to educate readers about the reality of the college sports industry, as someone who has been there before,” shares Lever. “Sometimes, facts and statistics don’t stick with people and since we are intrinsically wired to follow narratives, I wanted to tell people a story in hopes that the message would resonate in a unique and powerful way. I wanted to give college sports the 1984 treatment and create a narrative that would be impactful and a little unsettling.”M.K. Lever, a former Division 1 athlete and PhD candidate at UT Austin, combines her personal experiences as a college athlete and the weight of her academic research in areas concerning NCAA rhetoric, discourse, and policy to create her stunning and emotionally driven literary debut. Surviving the Second Tier depicts a new day in college athletics in which the old multi-sport model has collapsed and the bare bones, but extremely profitable Amateur Fighting Association has risen in its place. Where students once competed in a multitude of sports on a variety of playing fields, now college athletes have only the AFA ring in which to prove themselves in full-contact, no holds barred fights to the finish.Undefeated and on her way to a perfect record, Sicily “Sis” Jones pushes her way through injury and intense stress to maintain both her fighting record and her perfect GPA. Financial pressure, family pressure, and a cut-throat coach add to her already driven nature, keeping her right at the edge of breaking and hungry to win. Most of Sis’s teammates are in no better place – the AFA taps into the pool of poor, disadvantaged kids and the fame attained in the ring to further the profits wrung from the lives of the athletes. Each member of Sis’s team is “fighting scared”, battling the personal demons that drive them and having those expertly exploited by their coach to gain maximum control of his fighters. When the AFA pits Sis against one of her own teammates in competition, a violent outcome fractures the fragile bond between teammates, coaches, and the AFA, changing the game in new and unexpected ways. Can Sis and her teammates learn to use their voices, rather than their fists, to fight for change and to survive the second tier?As a graduate student researching NCAA policy and rhetoric, Lever began to describe college athletics as a “dystopia” and soon found that listeners engaged more with the ideas she was sharing. "Surviving the Second Tier is different from other dystopias,” explains Lever. “It targets the college sports industry, inviting the reader to spend some time living and experiencing the life of a college athlete rather than just watching them compete or reading about them in the media. I wanted to present the real-world issues that affect college athletes in an engaging and palatable way and give a bigger picture of the issues beyond just economic exploitation, which is where most of the public discourse focuses."