Students with daily activity requirements are physically and emotionally healthier and perform better academically
Josh Fullan is the executive director of Maximum City, a national education and engagement organization based in Toronto. He recently wrote a compelling opinion piece on the need for more physical education in schools for The Globe and Mail. Fullan outlines the physical, mental and academic benefits of regular exercise. He emphasizes the academic and…
LIV Tour is a PR tool for a reprehensible government seeking to wash away its human rights abuse
The things people will do for money … The way Greg Norman, Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Graeme McDowell and other professional golfers tap dance while trying to come up with reasons to justify their move to the new LIV Tour is embarrassing. The LIV Tour has nothing to do with growing the game of golf,…
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…
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…
“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…
The unvaccinated don’t seem to get that life is a team sport, not a me sport
Aaron Rodgers has every right to hold whatever thoughts and beliefs he might have about COVID-19 and vaccines. But that freedom ends when his actions have a negative – or potentially negative – health impact on others. What the unvaccinated don’t seem to get is that this game called life we’re all playing is a…
Indigenous nicknames, logos, mascots and rituals are inappropriate and insensitive
Why is this so hard? In the year 2021, why do some sports organizations still insist on using Indigenous American names, mascots, caricatures, rituals, etc., to promote their team? And in the case of Atlanta’s Major League Baseball team, why do they continue to encourage fans to do the tomahawk chop by turning the lights…
Unvaccinated NBA star won’t be welcomed back to the Nets until he’s fully able to participate in all team activities
The Brooklyn Nets have said thanks but no thanks to Kyrie Irving’s offer to be a part-time player for their National Basketball Association team. Due to public safety concerns regarding the pandemic, the unvaccinated Irving won’t be allowed to play games in New York. According to the city mandate, anyone entering an indoor gym/arena –…
We need a lot more ‘we’ people than ‘me’ people – in professional sports and everywhere else
National Basketball Association training camps are in full swing and 50 or so players (of about 530 total) have yet to receive a single COVID-19 vaccine dose. That’s an issue NBA executives and coaches were hoping to avoid. This summer, league officials proposed a mandate requiring all players to be vaccinated against COVID in order…
Active students have better grades, enhanced memory, lower absenteeism and better behaviour
The physical activity levels of our young people were already trending downward when COVID-19 hit. The pandemic made things worse. Kids around were stuck at home, forced to try to learn virtually. An online math class is one thing. A physical education class at home is nearly impossible. During the pandemic, physical education has been…
Cleveland MLB franchise sees the light and adopts a new name
Cleveland Guardians. Sure it sounds weird. Cleveland’s baseball team has been called the Indians for more than a century. But everyone will get used to it. Most importantly, it was the right thing to do. Yes, the name Indians is less egregious than the blatantly racist name Redskins that Washington’s National Football League team used…
Here we go again. The University of Texas and University of Oklahoma are reportedly exploring the possibility of leaving the Big 12 Conference for the Southeastern Conference (SEC) in search of more money and exposure for their athletic programs. The American college sports landscape has changed rapidly in the last several months. The United States…
National Football League player Carl Nassib has given the battle against homophobia in sports and society in general a huge boost
Las Vegas Raiders’ defensive lineman Carl Nassib announced he was gay last week. He’s the first active National Football League player to do so. It was a landmark announcement that will help thousands of young LGBTQ athletes and non-athletes alike. It’s a milestone that has – and will continue to – garner a lot of…
Humanistic coaches focus on encouragement and positive motivation. They believe humans seek out fun and want to actualize themselves
“Fun is good.” – Mike Veeck, creator of a variety of innovative and fun baseball promotions Unfortunately, the vast majority of coaches, from the youth level to the professional level, adopt a militaristic coaching style. They believe a taskmaster mentality is how you get the best from athletes. It’s not. “Nothing, according to the research,…
We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis, and it’s crying out for more attention. Lives are being lost to suicide. Depression, anxiety and other forms of mental illness negatively affect entire families, not just the individual suffering. Work productivity is impacted to a significant degree due to mental health issues. And yet, there’s…
Sport at its best is a co-operative activity. We compete with our opponents, not against them
I love to collect quotes on a wide variety of subjects but especially sports. I’ve shared some of my favourites in the past. However, there are so many great ones, I’ve decided to share a few more. We celebrated Jackie Robinson Day on April 15, so I’ll start with a quote from the man who…
Major League Baseball’s decision to move the all-star game out of Georgia and to Colorado will guarantee that state voting laws will be a big story in the days surrounding the game. Colorado’s voting system will undoubtedly get a lot of attention, especially as the July 13 game gets closer. That’s good news, whatever your…
The general approach should be to have experts in each sport come together and decide on the specific rules for allowing fair competition
Most of the sports issues I write about are pretty straightforward – at least in my mind. The solutions seem pretty clear. Do big-time college athletes deserve a bigger slice of the billions being made from their efforts? Undoubtedly. In an era in which childhood obesity is at epidemic levels, and teenage anxiety, depression and…
What constitutes manhood in sports culture is archaic. As if the sports world has been frozen in time – Neanderthal time
What former New York Mets general manager Jared Porter did to a female reporter is despicable. He certainly deserved to be fired after admitting to sending dozens of explicit text messages and photos to the reporter in 2016. The sad part is almost everyone inside baseball – most notably women in baseball – know this…
We’re in the midst of both a COVID-19 pandemic and a childhood physical inactivity epidemic. That creates a dilemma for young athletes and their parents: Is the risk of playing organized sports during the pandemic greater than the risk of the negative physical and mental impacts of not playing? Young people need to move their…
Why is the Cleveland baseball team waiting until 2022 to make the change? Let the healing begin now
Finally, Cleveland’s Major League Baseball (MLB) team says it plans to replace its racist Indians nickname. That’s great news. The Indigenous shouldn’t be used as nicknames and mascots for sports teams in the same way lions, bears and other animals are. Period. But why is the Cleveland organization waiting until 2022 to make the change?…
The policy appears to be ‘the show must go on,’ no matter what the health consequences are
U.S. college basketball’s March Madness is one of my favourite sporting events of the year. The upsets are fun. The one-loss-and-you’re-gone format of the national championship tournament is much more exciting than the long playoff season the National Basketball Association gives us. The bands. The crazy student sections. Switching back and forth between tournament games…
Mental health challenges also negatively impact sports performance
Anxiety and depression are common mental health issues among college students. According to Daniel Eisenberg, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, one in three American college students experience significant symptoms of depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions. College athletes certainly aren’t immune to these mental health challenges. In…
Josh Fullan is the executive director of Maximum City, a national education and engagement organization based in Toronto. He recently wrote a compelling opinion piece on the need for more physical education in schools for The Globe and Mail. Fullan outlines the physical, mental and academic benefits of regular exercise. He emphasizes the academic and…
