As debuts go, winning Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference Newcomer of the Year in women’s basketball is pretty good — and yet somehow, it might not be the most impressive one of 2025 for Erica Buening ’28. Buening, who averaged 10 points and a team-leading 6.4 rebounds as a freshman, recently one-upped her on-court performance by publishing her debut novel, The Atropos Games. She started writing the story about five years ago during the pandemic.
“Honestly, I was kind of bored during COVID, and I was like, ‘I’ll just try something new,’” she said. “I’ve always liked to read, so I just wanted to try writing — and I kind of ended up loving it, obviously.” In The Atropos Games, six teens at a Maine boarding school join a scavenger hunt that quickly turns perilous, uncovering secrets and testing friendships as danger closes in. With each chapter told from a different character’s viewpoint, Buening expertly weaves the adventure together and makes it harder to put down with every chapter.
Equally surprising to the book’s twists and turns was her writing process. “I didn’t have a specific plot line; I sort of just wrote as I went,” Buening said. “So, it kind of took longer because of that, because most of it was just off the top of my head. It was like, ‘Oh, I like this idea; I’m going to put this in there.’ It really wasn’t super planned out until the second and third book.”
Yes, you read that right, second and third. The Atropos Games is the first in a trilogy that Buening has already written. Book two, she hopes, will be published within the next few months after the editing process is finished. “I actually was going to stop after one, just have sort of a cliffhanger ending,” she said. “But then I was sitting on it and I was like, ‘No, I don’t like that anymore,’’ so I wanted to just build off of it.”
Buening will try to do the same on the court this winter with a Grizzlies team that returns three starters and six of the top nine scorers after a 15- win campaign in 2024–25. The 5-foot-10 sophomore figures to be one of the main characters in the story once again. “I’m really excited,” Buening said. “I feel great about the team, and I feel like we have a really good dynamic just starting off, which is an important foundation for any team to have, so I’m excited to build off of that and get the season started finally.”
Though her schedule is plenty busy between basketball and her pursuit of a degree in exercise science, Buening finds time to write whenever she can, noting that “a lot of times when I’m on my phone and it looks like I’m texting a lot, I’m really just editing or writing.”
That sometimes-covert process allowed her to catch even those closest to her by surprise; Erica’s father, Paul Buening ’00, knew that his daughter had been writing but “had no idea she was publishing until it was out; she kept it all pretty quiet.” Now, he and his wife, Susan (Buerger) ’01, are top fans of the book. Buening said that her teammates also have been supportive and that a few have started reading the book; one even asked her to sign a copy. When asked which of her two debut milestones she was more impressed by, Buening — somewhat surprisingly — chose her basketball accolade “because anyone can write, I feel like.” Civilized folks can agree to disagree on that matter. But both on the court and off, Buening’s fans are eager to see what the next chapter will bring.
The Atropos Games is available to read in paperback or on Kindle via Amazon.
By Ryan O’Leary, Sports Information Director