Rapid Readers' Advisory: Sports

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich --"The reporter who broke the Houston Astros' cheating scandal reveals how a baseball team could so dramatically descend into corruption, with never-before-told details of a broken management culture, the once-revered leaders who enabled it and the scandal itself." #Corruption #History #Baseball

"Kara Goucher grew up with Olympic dreams. She excelled at running from a young age, and though she was confronted with serious challenges including the death of her father and struggles with disordered eating, her prospects were bright. She won high school cross country championships in Minnesota, NCAA track and field championships at the University of Colorado, and when she graduated from college, Nike offered her a sponsorship deal. Alberto Salazar was a legend of American distance running. He ran at the University of Oregon, made two Olympic teams, and won the New York and Boston marathons in the 1980s. In the early 2000s he was hired by Nike as a coach to build a team that would reestablish the United States as a distance running powerhouse. Dubbed the Nike Oregon Project, it would be based at the company's spectacular headquarters near Portland. In 2004, Kara and her Olympian-runner husband, Adam, were invited by Alberto to move to Oregon and join the elite team. It seemed the opportunity of a lifetime and the start of her dreams coming true. But behind the scenes, Salazar was hiding dark secrets beneath his charming persona. Narcissistic and power hungry, he demanded complete control over his runners, pushing and then crossing the limits of anti-doping rules and even promoting a culture of abuse. #Corruption #Doping #Nike #OlympicAthletes #TrackandField #eBook

A gripping, provocative history of doping in sports-packed with examples-that proposes a new emphasis for modern anti-doping efforts. Why is doping a perennial problem for sports? Is this solely a contemporary phenomenon? And should doping always be regarded as cheating, or do today's anti-doping measures go too far? Drawing on case studies from the early twentieth century to the present day, Doping: A Sporting History explores why the current anti-doping system looks as it does, charting its origins to the founding of the modern Olympic Games. #Athletes #DrugUse #History

 This book explores the local environmental impact of sports stadiums, and how that impact can disproportionately affect communities of color. Offering a series of review articles and global case studies, it illustrates what happens when sport organizations and other public and private stakeholders fail to factor environmental justice into their planning and operations processes. #EnvironmentalJustice #SportsFacilities #UrbanEcology #eBook

Moneyball Explains how Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money. #Baseball #Economics #Scouting

"Research into sports fandom makes the sometimes counterintuitive case for why being a fan is good for us individually and is a force for positive change in our society." #Psychology #Sociology #SportsSpectators

"Now is the best time in human history to launch a sports startup. Many opportunities will be created given the combination of disruptive technologies, segmentation of entertainment and the low cost of starting businesses. While there are clear distribution channels to the fast growing entrepreneurship minors across campuses, this book is aimed at practitioners and mainstream audiences; most current books on sports entrepreneurship fall firmly into the academic textbook category. The Big Six Sports - NFL, NCAA, NBA, MLS, MLB and NHL - have limited startup opportunities, unless one has an extra $250 million in the bank. However, fields such as eSports, analytics, personal performance, and youth sports have more flexibility." #Business #Entrepeneurship #SportsAdministration #eBook

This biography presents the life of the first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, nicknamed the Galveston Giant, whose flamboyant personality and defiance of racial stereotypes in the early twentieth century often made him the object of public outrage and a target of law enforcement officials. #Galveston #Texas #BlackHistory #TexasHistory

Colin O'Brady's awe-inspiring memoir spans his triumphant recovery from a tragic accident to his gripping 932-mile solo crossing of Antarctica. Prior to December 2018, no individual had ever crossed the landmass of Antarctica alone, without support and completely human powered. Yet, Colin O'Brady was determined to do just that, even if, ten years earlier, there was doubt that he'd ever walk again normally. From the depths of a tragic accident, he fought his way back. In a quest to unlock his potential and discover what was possible, he went on to set three mountaineering world records before turning to this historic Antarctic challenge. O'Brady's pursuit of a goal that had eluded many others was made even more intense by a head-to-head battle that emerged with British polar explorer Captain Louis Rudd--also striving to be "the first." #Adventurers #Antarctica #Biography #Injuries #Travel

"From the FIFA World Cup to pick-up games at your local park, soccer is the closest thing in our world to a universal entertainment. Many writers use this global popularity to describe the game's winners and losers, but what happens when we use social science to explore how soccer intersects with culture, society, and the self? This book provides a thinking fan's guide to the world's most popular game, proposing a way of engaging soccer that sparks intellectual curiosity and employs critical consciousness. Using stories and data, along with ideas from sociology, psychology, and across the social sciences, it provides readers with new ways of understanding fanaticism, peak performance, talent development, and more. Drawing on concepts ranging from cognitive bias to globalization, it illuminates meanings of the game for players and fans while investigating impacts on our lives and communities." #Fandom #Globalization #Soccer #WorldCup #eBook