Pay for Play

Author: Ronald A. Smith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252035879
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
In an era when college football coaches frequently command higher salaries than university presidents, many call for reform to restore the balance between amateur athletics and the educational mission of schools. This book traces attempts at college athletics reform from 1855 through the early twenty-first century while analyzing the different roles played by students, faculty, conferences, university presidents, the NCAA, legislatures, and the Supreme Court. Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform also tackles critically important questions about eligibility, compensation, recruiting, sponsorship, and rules enforcement. Discussing reasons for reform--to combat corruption, to level the playing field, and to make sports more accessible to minorities and women--Ronald A. Smith candidly explains why attempts at change have often failed. Of interest to historians, athletic reformers, college administrators, NCAA officials, and sports journalists, this thoughtful book considers the difficulty in balancing the principles of amateurism with the need to draw income from sporting events.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066231
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Introduction to Intercollegiate Athletics

Author: Eddie Comeaux
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142141662X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
Intercollegiate athletics continue to bedevil American higher education. This book explores the complexities of intercollegiate athletics while explaining the organizational structures, key players, terms, and important issues relevant to the growing fields of recreational studies, sports management, and athletic administration.

Managing Sport

Author: David Hassan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415572150
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
This text is written especially for sport management students to examine the wider social and cultural environment and to fully explain the key issues and practical implications for everyday sport management.

Sports Marketing

Author: Michael J. Fetchko
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315506475
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Book Description
For courses in Sports Marketing. Help students understand the business of sports through a practitioner’s perspective. Written from the perspective of those who’ve been actively involved in the sports business, Sports Marketing addresses business and marketing issues pertinent to sports as observed by the practitioners and scholars themselves. Through its extensive presentation of current information, this text also helps encourage students to get actively involved and engaged in the process of sports entertainment. Features: Present information from the field: A practitioner’s approach. Most sports marketing texts are crafted using a marketing principles template. The organization and chapter themes of these texts are often too similar to Principles of Marketing texts. Sports Marketing strives to depart from that practice by focusing on important conceptual, strategic, and actionable areas of the sports marketing function. Practitioner contributions come from the author team, and a high caliber roster of successful sports executives from media, marketing, and other areas of sports business. Industry experts highlights. Each chapter features an industry expert. Each expert was selected based on his or her knowledge and provided input on chapter content. The Insider Expert feature that appears early in each chapter gives biographical information on the chapter’s industry contributor. Sports examples. Throughout the book, concepts are reinforced with examples of practices and events from the sports industry. A variety of sports, properties, and companies are used as examples to bring to life definitions and concepts presented. Put students’ analytical skills into play: Critical thinking exercises, which are found throughout this text, require students to consider various situations faced by the sports marketers and sports executives. The end-of-chapter sports marketing cases put students in the role of decision maker, enabling students to apply knowledge and key concepts to business situations faced by actual sports brands. Expert insights. Each chapter concludes with Insider Insights, a question-and-answer feature with the chapter’s industry contributor. In this feature, experts share examples of best practices from their experiences and opinions about trends in sports marketing. Preview the chapter’s game plan: Lead-in vignettes. Each chapter begins with a vignette related to sports marketing and the content of the chapter. The vignette describes a practice or occurrence that illustrates a topic appearing in the chapter, setting the stage for more in-depth coverage in the chapter. Get students ready for the big leagues: Career planning. Many students take a sports marketing course because they have a serious interest in pursuing a career in sports business. In order to help students plan for their future careers, the final chapter contains: -Information about different career opportunities in sports marketing. -Steps students can take to position themselves as job candidates. -Advice on career planning and management from a panel of the book’s industry experts.

Sports

Author: Gail Fay
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810882183
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
Whether playing baseball, basketball, field hockey, football, lacrosse, tennis, soccer, softball, volleyball, or wrestling, millions of teens all over the country participate in some sporting activity. Despite widespread enthusiasm for such activities, not all teens know how to make the most out of their interests, and some teens who might want to get involved don’t know which sports are right for them. For high school athletes of all levels, this book provides up-to-date information on sports-related issues, practical tips, and valuable resources. Each chapter features quotes from current and former high school athletes who share their experiences related to the given topic. Issues discussed include choosing a sport to play balancing all aspects of life as a student-athlete dealing with the pressures of competition improving athletic performance consequences of performance-enhancing drugs and supplements common injuries and prevention measures training during the off-season playing in college sports-related careers and opportunities Throughout the book, readers will find sidebars containing various sports-related tidbits: high school sports stories, the history of various sports, interesting facts, short biographies, and sports-themed young adult novels. Filled with useful information, Sports: The Ultimate Teen Guide will help high school athletes of all levels, from freshman novices to highly competitive seniors.

Athletic Director's Desk Reference

Author: Lopiano, Donna
Publisher: Human Kinetics
ISBN: 0736082816
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
Athletic Director’s Desk Reference is the most authoritative and comprehensive resource available for collegiate athletic administrators. This book and web resource guide program administrators in navigating their increasingly complex roles in athletic programs of any size.

The Athletic Trap

Author: Howard L. Nixon II
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421411962
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
The commercial model of college sports entangles presidents, boards, and their institutions in a complex web of dysfunctional commitments. The unrivaled amount of cash poured into the college athletic system has made sports programs breeding grounds for corruption while diverting crucial resources from the academic mission of universities. Like money in Washington politics, the influence bought by a complex set of self-interested actors seriously undermines movement toward reform while trapping universities in a cycle of escalating competition. Longtime sport sociologist Howard L. Nixon II approaches the issue from the perspective of college presidents—how they are seduced by prestige or pressured by economics into building programs that move schools toward a commercial model of athletics. Nixon situates his analysis in the context of what he calls “the intercollegiate golden triangle,” a powerful social network of athletic, media, and private corporate commercial interests. This network lures presidents and other university leaders into an athletic arms race with promises of institutional enhancements, increased enrollments, better student morale, improved alumni loyalty, more financial contributions, and higher prestige. These promises can cloud the judgment of college presidents and governing boards, entangling them in an athletic trap that restricts their influence. Unable to control spending, inequalities, and deviance within commercialized athletic programs, universities are ensnared in financial, political, and social obligations that are difficult to sustain—or escape. Nixon clarifies the structure of this trap, describes how higher education institutions fall into it, and explores what it means for institutions and presidents caught in it. This timely analysis also has relevance to the debates about the role of the NCAA and ongoing reform efforts in college sports. The Athletic Trap will be of interest to university presidents, board members, and administrators, sport sociologists concerned with the balance of power between academics and athletics, and anyone else with a serious interest in college sports and its future.

Why Are Student Athletes Funding Your Future?

Author: Dr. Ernest E. Cutler, Jr.
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1491782544
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
Scholarship shortfalls persist, leaving NCAA scholarship student-athletes to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for additional educational expenses not covered by their current athletic scholarships. Meanwhile, NCAA campuses continue to generate money from the sale of apparel and other merchandise featuring star athletes. In this detailed study, Ernest Cutler explores the troubling history of money changing hands, with none of it going to student athletes who are for some reason considered amateurs that should not be eligible for payment. He also takes a careful look about what such a system says about academic values and educational institutions, as well as how the system contributes to infractions by student-athletes, coaches, and athletic administrators. This research study is not intended to disrespect the NCAA, but it does seek to serve as a tool to change problematic policies that infringe upon the rights of current, former, and future student athletes.

World Sports

Author: Maylon Hanold
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
This book covers a wide range of issues and controversies within the world of sports—including drug use, economics, ethics, ethnicity, gender, globalization, politics, race, sexuality, and technology—from both a U.S. and global perspective. World Sports: A Reference Handbook covers a wide variety of sports-related controversies, including ethical, political, technological, business, and social issues related to the phenomenon of sports. Many of the larger topics are covered from multiple angles, often providing both a global and American perspective. The work provides unique insights into the commonly addressed subject of sports, supplying information that most readers will find unfamiliar and thought-provoking. Addressing forms of sports as diverse as American football, skateboarding, NASCAR auto racing, ultrarunning, and the disciplines of the Olympic Games, the title's topics are discussed in depth to illuminate the sport's specific issues and are backed with information from relevant sports organizations, biographies of important people, chronologies, and charts and graphs. The information within this handbook is based upon the latest academic research but presented in very accessible language, making it appropriate for high school and undergraduate students as well as general readers.