North Country native Jenn Hildreth and co-author Aimee Leone have just published Tough As A Mother: Women in Sports, Working Moms, and the Shared Traits that Empower Us All.

Tough as a Mother brings together an extraordinary group of women—athletes, coaches, broadcasters, and professionals who know firsthand the challenges and rewards of balancing family and career.

Although Hildreth currently lives in Atlanta, Ga. with her husband and two children and where she is an Emmy award-winning ESPN broadcaster,  her roots run deep in the North Country. She graduated as salutatorian of Norwood-Norfolk Central School class of ’95 where she was a three-sport athlete, and in 1995 helped her basketball team win the Section X Championship.  In the summer of 1996, she interned at the Watertown Daily Times covering local sports. She is the daughter of Saranac Lake’s artist Sandra Hildreth and SUNY Potsdam Professor Emeritus Joe Hildreth.

The book focuses on the challenges women face when pursuing careers as well as motherhood. It was inspired by the development of Hildreth’s own career as a professional play-by-play commentator for sports that ranged from NCAA tournaments to the National Women’s Soccer League, MLB, the Women’s World Cup, and the Olympics, and the lives of other journalists, coaches, and the elite athletes themselves. Legendary soccer player Julie Foudy wrote the Foreword to the book.

Hildreth’s additional connection to the North Country was as the 1998 recipient of the Charles B. Decker Memorial Scholarship, administered by the Adirondack Community Foundation, while a student at Emory University. That scholarship enabled her to accept a journalism internship with a major newspaper in South Africa, where she covered local sports, setting her on the path to her successful professional career. The Charles B. Decker Memorial Scholarship was established in 1991 upon the death of Charles B. Decker, 34, an enthusiastic journalist from Saranac Lake, then an Assistant Managing Editor of the Watertown Daily Times.

Both Hildreth and her coauthor Aimee Leone, a six-time Emmy Award winner and the Senior Vice President of Talent Relations for FOX Sports, know first-hand the challenges of combining professional careers with motherhood. In their book, they not only connect readers with sports icons but also share their own insights as working mothers, offering a relatable, unvarnished take on the real-life balancing act of career and family.

Hildreth will sign books at The Bookstore Plus, on Main Street in Lake Placid, on Saturday, July 12, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Tough As A Mother: Women in Sports, Working Moms, and the Shared Traits that Empower Us All was published by Triumph Books and is hardcover, 240 pages, ISBN 9781637277201.