Featuring a new preface by the author, this book looks closely at college sports and how they shape the athletic and personal landscape for girls and young women. Filled with interviews from female athletes of all ages, this book chronicles how college and youth sports have become more corporate, to the detriment of participants.

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.

The modern day youth sports environment has taken the enjoyment out of athletics for our children. Currently, 70% of kids drop out of organized sports by the age of 13, which has given rise to a generation of overweight, unhealthy young adults. There is a solution. John O’Sullivan shares the secrets of the coaches and parents who have not only raised elite athletes, but have done so by creating an environment that promotes positive core values and teaches life lessons instead of focusing on wins and losses, scholarships, and professional aspirations. Changing the Game gives adults a new paradigm and a game plan for raising happy, high performing children, and provides a national call to action to return youth sports to our kids.

Is sport good for kids? When answering this question, both critics and advocates of youth sports tend to fixate on matters of health, whether condemning contact sports for their concussion risk or prescribing athletics as a cure for the childhood obesity epidemic. Child’s Play presents a more nuanced examination of the issue, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports—in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television—play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society. Rather than focusing exclusively on self-proclaimed jocks, the book considers how the culture of sports affects a wide variety of children and young people, including those who opt out of athletics. Not only does Child’s Play examine disparities across lines of race, class, and gender, it also offers detailed examinations of how various minority populations, from transgender youth to Muslim immigrant girls, have participated in youth sports. Taken together, these essays offer a wide range of approaches to understanding the sociology of youth sports, including data-driven analyses that examine national trends, as well as ethnographic research that gives a voice to individual kids. Child’s Play thus presents a comprehensive and compelling analysis of how, for better and for worse, the culture of sports is integral to the development of young people—and with them, the future of our society.

In life as in sports, it's how you play the game that matters You don't have to be a star athlete to take away valuable lessons from the world of sports, whether it's learning how to get along with others, to never give up, or to be gracious in victory and defeat. In this companion volume to his New York Times bestseller, The Games Do Count, Brian Kilmeade reveals personal stories of the defining sports moments in the lives of athletes, CEOs, actors, politicians, and historical figures—and how what they learned on the field prepared them to handle life and overcome adversity with courage, dignity, and sportsmanship.

This book provides a systematic and interdisciplinary analysis of the published literature and practical initiatives on the sports-Christianity interface from both Protestant and Catholic perspectives. Within the context of this relatively new and rapidly expanding area of inquiry, this text offers an original contribution to the current literature for both undergraduate and postgraduate students and serves as a point of reference for academics from a wide range of related fields including theology and religious studies, psychology, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, health-religion studies, and sports studies. The book will also be of interest to sports chaplains, those involved in sports ministry organizations, physical educators and sports coaches who wish to adopt a more critical and ‘holistic’ approach to their work. As modern-day sports are often entwined with commercial and political agendas, the book also provides an important response to the ‘win-at-all-costs’ and business orientated philosophy, which characterises much of contemporary sport practice, yet which cannot always be fully understood through secular inquiry.

What is sport? Why does sport matter? How can we use philosophy to understand what sport means today? This engaging and highly original introduction to the philosophy of sport uses dialogue – a form of philosophical investigation – to address the fundamental questions in sport studies and to explore key contemporary issues such as fair play, gender, drug use, cheating, entertainment and identity. Providing a clear, informative and accessible introduction to the philosophy of sport, every chapter includes current sporting examples as well as review questions and guides to further reading. The dialogue form enables students to engage in debate and raise questions, while encouraging them to think from the perspectives of athlete, coach, spectator and philosopher. The issues raised present real and complex ethical dilemmas that relate to a variety of sports from around the world such as soccer, athletics, baseball, basketball, hockey and tennis. No other book brings this rich subject to life through the use of dialogue, making this an indispensable companion to any course on the philosophy or ethics of sport.