This past week’s Sports Illustrated featured tonight’s football game for the National Championship between the University of Oregon and Ohio State University. It is the culmination of the first real playoff in Division I college football. In this issue there was another article, one by Seth Davis about someone I have always loved spending time [...]
Given I’ve been coaching for over 50 years, I am always very interested in what others coaches do. For the most part, what I don’t get to discover is who they “be” in delivering the daily practices that develop their team. Mostly I use how their teams go about their business. What kinds of winners [...]
The past week’s Sports Illustrated cover story was “Homeless Athletes.” I don’t know the authors’ intent for sure and I am pretty sure that they wanted to create attention around a problem to cause something good to happen. There is nothing new or exceptional about this problem. It has been that way since I began [...]
Today is the first day of the second workshop we have done at Providence College over the past few days. We worked with the lacrosse team last weekend and are working with the softball team starting this afternoon. The work we are doing is called Building a Championship Team, and we have been teaching this [...]
A couple of weeks ago the best basketball team I ever coached at the community college level had a reunion in Las Vegas. Even though we were a California team, we felt that Las Vegas would attract the largest number of team members. Also, we had athletes from both coasts on the team. Of course, [...]
The structure of the NCAA and intercollegiate athletics is under fire and rightfully so. How it has evolved has had many lose sight of the value of the experience for the athlete and those who know the athlete. Yesterday morning the University of California, Berkeley was represented in the women’s singles tennis final by a [...]
About this time every year a media breeze blows in called the NFL Draft. It is a time of conjecture, predictions and best guesses. It keeps the NFL in the limelight in this “off” season. The truth is there is no player who is a “can’t miss.” Someone will be rated lower that proves that [...]
In this conversation about college athletes being paid I hope none of you are holding on to the illusion that college athletes are amateurs. Even if they don’t receive cash money, they are organized around a schedule that demands professionalism. In-season training, off-season training that includes some type of summer training or competition or both [...]
In my most recent blog post I talked about the movement by collegiate athletes to get paid for their services. I don’t know the right and wrong or the good and bad of this. However, I am concerned about the process and the ultimate results and effects of this. I know we can’t keep selling [...]
In the world of intercollegiate athletics the current “hot conversation” is should the athletes receive compensation for their participation? It seems their $40,000 a year scholarships aren’t sufficient, so there is a lot of talk about a players union. Given my personal bias regarding unions I will just leave it at that. There will be [...]