Ron Alvey has stood in enough middle school locker rooms to fill a book. So he did. Have You Ever Issued a 7th Grader Football Pads?, his debut, arrives from Irving, Texas in March 2026 — a collection of stories from the coalface of public school PE that Alvey describes as “seriously funny” and his publisher would probably describe as unpublishable by anyone who hasn’t actually done the job.
The premise is the title. Alvey is a middle school PE teacher and coach of several decades’ standing, and the book documents what those decades actually look like: the smell, the chaos, the preteens who cannot yet coordinate their limbs, the colleagues who have seen too much, and the endless low-grade absurdity of trying to teach anything to a room of twelve-year-olds who are primarily thinking about lunch.
“This isn’t a book for sitting quietly in a library,” Alvey said. “It’s for parents, teachers, and anyone who has survived middle school. Read it on the throne, at the beach, or anywhere you need a five-minute escape from reality.”
At 104 pages in its shorter format, the book moves fast. Locker room chaos, coordination disasters, hygiene negotiations — each chapter lands and moves on. Alvey writes with the timing of someone who has spent years managing a room where attention spans evaporate in seconds. That experience shows.
The target audience is broad in theory and specific in practice: anyone who has taught, coached, parented, or simply endured a middle schooler will find something recognisable. The irreverence is the point. Alvey is a self-described “highly underpaid 1%er” who is also, according to the About section of his own press release, considering a presidential run on a platform of love, equality, and taxing billionaires — a claim almost certainly made in the same spirit as the book itself.
A member of Unity Church of Dallas, Alvey has spent his career in Irving-area public education. Have You Ever Issued a 7th Grader Football Pads? is his first book. He says it was written entirely from the bathroom. Given the subject matter, that tracks.
Available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
