Author Archive for homer

Study Shows Campaign for Cricket in Schools Gives Children Life Skills

Published on November 3, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

tess-kayruthjeansFrom a Loughborough University Press release:

An independent study has confirmed the educational and social benefits of a charity’s £50m campaign to regenerate competitive cricket in state schools.

The study by Ruth Jeanes and Tess Kay at Loughborough University’s Institute of Youth Sport (IYS) will be released at a press conference on 26 November. It found that Chance to shine, which works through cricket clubs to provide 50 hours of coaching and competition for each school, had brought widespread benefits on the playing field and in the classroom.

Dr Jeanes, who led the IYS research team, said “Chance to shine increased pupils’ confidence and self esteem. It also successfully involved many pupils who were previously disengaged from sport and PE and there has also been evidence that participation and involvement in cricket can be used successfully to encourage positive behaviour from some more difficult to reach pupils.”

Dr Kay commented, ‘The response we have seen to Chance to shine shows that many of the problems we face in engaging young people in sport and physical activity really can be overcome – but it takes quality provision to achieve that. The research findings are very encouraging for those who believe sport can be used to engage young people, help them be more physically active, and contribute to their broader social development’.

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As Stadiums Vanish, Their Debt Lives On

Published on September 8, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments
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William T. Cahill, left, the New Jersey governor in 1971, with Wellington Mara, center, the owner of the Giants. Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

From Ken Belson in the New York Times:

It’s the gift that keeps on taking. The old Giants Stadium, demolished to make way for New Meadowlands Stadium, still carries about $110 million in debt, or nearly $13 for every New Jersey resident, even though it is now a parking lot.

The financial hole was dug over decades by politicians who passed along the cost of building and fixing the stadium, and it is getting deeper. With the razing of the old stadium and the Giants and the Jets moving into their splashy new home next door, a big source of revenue to pay down the debt has shriveled.

New Jerseyans are hardly alone in paying for stadiums that no longer exist. Residents of Seattle’s King County owe more than $80 million for the Kingdome, which was razed in 2000. The story has been similar in Indianapolis and Philadelphia. In Houston, Kansas City, Mo., Memphis and Pittsburgh, residents are paying for stadiums and arenas that were abandoned by the teams they were built for.

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Spartacus and Pulling Gods: This is your very breakable brain on NFL Sunday

Published on January 18, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

helmentsFrom Sam Kean in 3 quarks daily:

Head injuries have dogged the National Football League since its very early days, since even before facemasks. But, donning the proud mantle of tobacco scientists everywhere, the NFL’s experts refused to admit until just a few months ago that it wasn’t a coincidence so many former players ended up with neurological damage by the time they turned fifty. The word going around is that a few skeptical medical men in charge of the NFL’s official investigation into the matter, a team led by one Dr. Ira Casson, had been dismissing the link between concussions and cognitive difficulties. Casson seemed obviously full of crap, and after Congress hog-piled onto the issue to scold the league, the NFL finally dismissed Casson and reevaluated the evidence. It was damning. In one study, coroners discovered that twelve of thirteen former NFL players had a buildup of a plaque in their brains—a plaque—called tau, a snarl of protein that disrupts neuronal function and that has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Many of the NFL players died in their forties; another autopsy revealed the beginning of tau tangles in an 18-year-old.

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No Sprinting Advantage With Prosthetic Limbs

Published on November 24, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
Unfair advantage? Because they produce less force with each step, lightweight sprinting prostheses probably don't give amputee athletes a leg up. Credit: Orthopedic Specialty Hospital

Unfair advantage? Because they produce less force with each step, lightweight sprinting prostheses probably don't give amputee athletes a leg up. Credit: Orthopedic Specialty Hospital

From Michael Torrice in ScienceNOW Daily News.

In 2007, South African double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius became the first disabled athlete to compete against able-bodied runners, placing seventh in the British Grand Prix. But his J-shaped carbon-fiber prostheses, called the Össur Flex-Foot Cheetah, sparked a debate within the athletic world: Do the devices give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied competitors? The answer, according to a new study of six amputee sprinters, is no.

Scientists debate whether the Össur Cheetah boosts performance. Some experts believed that Pistorius’s setup would allow him and other amputee sprinters to move their legs faster than able-bodied runners and reach high speeds more easily. But last summer, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge showed that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs didn’t generate as much force against the ground as biological legs.

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New History of Sport Psychology

Published on November 13, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

212-673303-product_largetomediumimage-thumbChristopher Green of York University and Ludy Benjamin of Texas A&M University are editors of Psychology Gets in the Game: Sport, Mind, and Behavior, 1880-1960, a new book from the University of Nebraska Press.

Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pioneering psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making greater use of empirical research methodologies, sought to understand mental factors that affect athletic performance. Though the psychologists behind the studies described here worked independently of one another and charted their own distinct courses of inquiry, their works, taken together, provided the corpus of precedents and foundations on which the modern field of sport psychology was built. The essays collected in this volume tell the stories not only of these psychologists and their subjects but of the social and academic context that surrounded them, shaping and being shaped by their ideas.