Accepting that you can fail leads you to handling failure during a competition
As an athlete, coach and sports fan, I’ve long been enamoured with the subject of confidence in sports, more specifically, how you get it and maintain it. I’ve been equally enamoured with the phenomenon of choking in the sports arena. Why do our minds sometimes sabotage our efforts to perform well by feeding us self-doubt…
Perfectionism has been shown to be a leading cause of depression and, thus, suicide
As Shalise Manza Young pointed out in a recent column for Yahoo! Sports, at least five National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletes in the United States have died by suicide in the last couple of months. One young person committing suicide is a tragedy. Five young student-athletes with bright futures taking their lives in such…
Fans left with an increasingly boring game
I don’t hate baseball analytics or their use by crafty baseball operations folks. I look at analytics gurus like Billy Beane, Theo Epstein and Andrew Friedman as smart guys who figured out how to exploit market inefficiencies in the game. But they’ve also inadvertently damaged the game as a fan experience and entertainment product. There’s…
It takes from the poor and middle class and gives to the rich
“The NFL is the richest sports franchise, full of billionaire capitalists demanding socialist handouts so they can make even more profits.” – Ralph Nader The billionaire owners of the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills, Terry and Kim Pegula, have landed US$850 million in taxpayer dollars for the construction of a new…
Time to end the government-sanctioned cartel
“Every other sport – like virtually every sort of business – is governed by the antitrust laws.” – Stuart Banner, author of The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States gave Major League Baseball an antitrust exemption in 1922 was…
Lack of action and decreasing entertainment value impacting attendance
As a game and entertainment product, Major League Baseball has plenty of problems. For starters: the pace of play is dreadful; strikeouts and walks are up and action is down; stolen base attempts are becoming extinct; a ball is only put in play every four minutes; just 20 per cent of generation Z members consider…
It focuses on making sports fun for their young people
As I write this, Norway is tied for second in total medals and gold medals at the Beijing Winter Olympic Games. Norwegians are projected to take home 45 medals by the end of these Games, surpassing the 39 they won at the 2018 Winter Olympics. That total was way above those for the United States,…
Kids become performers in a spectacle, under the authoritarian oversight of the head coach
Educational, physical, emotional and spiritual developmental goals for youth and high school sports programs are increasingly being brushed aside by win-at-all-costs and profit-at-all-costs ethos. The professionalization of youth sports organizations, our ‘little leagues,’ is appalling. Adults – parents and coaches – treat youth sports like the big-time pro and college versions. Kids quickly learn from…
If a huge majority of Americans can't denounce what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, the U.S. has big problems
Imagine a country where football players kneeling on the sideline peacefully protesting inequalities in their country are labelled “unpatriotic,” “treasonous” and “sons of bitches” by the president of the country, while citizens who violently storm the nation’s Capitol and break into the House Chamber in an attempt to stop the certification of a presidential election…
American society loves football so much it avoids hard discussions about the sport’s safety
We found out recently that a bright young man with a big heart and promising future died because of football. Twelve-year National Football League veteran and three-time pro bowler Vincent Jackson, who died at age 38 in February, had stage 2 CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) his family announced on Thursday. CTE is a degenerative brain…