Athletics Books

This man was one of the great track & field coaches of his time. His book provides good information for the beginning athlete, communicated in a simple, easily understood manner. The book is brief, however it touches on the full spectrum of basic techniques and considerations for a track & field athlete. It is particularly useful for high school level runners. As one of his athletes during his last years as a coach at Oregon State University, I treasure the copy of this book that I purchased years ago.

This is the best book for helping your soccer fanatic daughter to find the college that will best suit her. I'm really glad someone on her team pointed me to this book. I recommend it highly

The Wonder Crew is simply put--a great read. It is well written, historically interesting, and brings together politics, sports, WWI and WWII. The Golden Age of Sports is at its best in Saint Sing's masterfully written book. Rowers will love it and anyone just looking for something new and different will like it too!

This book is a terrific resource for anyone who works with gradeschool children and would like to incorporate fun fitness. Book has lesson plans for daily program already set up or you can use information, games and exercises in other formats. Book also has lessons on health and fitness subjects. The pages in my book are looking worn.

Through the media, we frequently hear about problems associated with athletes, such as drug abuse, illiteracy and low graduation rates. This book is written for the young athlete to help him or her avoid such pitfalls. It addresses issues such as steroid abuse, alcohol abuse and date rape. It also discusses NCAA requirements and athletic scholarships. In addition, it offers great tips on networking, budgeting, studying for exams effectively and maintaining self-discipline. With all of the pressures that young people face today, it is great to read a book whose purpose is to steer young people in a positive direction. I highly recommend it.

This is the best in-depth instruction geared toward youth basketball that I have read. It gives parents and coaches step by step instructions for teaching the fundamentals of basketball to young players.

Having been both a player, coach and referee for many years, I found Dr. Brown's work to be a complete text on coaching youth soccer. This handbook takes the reader through the basics of developing a new soccer club, working with parents and the players and provides a comprehensive understanding the roles and responsibilities of the the coach, players and parents. Included are indepth descriptions (with diagrams and photographs) starting with basic soccer movements and going through complex team drills. If one had to pick only a single book on the game of soccer, this handbook would be it.

This series Zanbanger, Zanballer and Zanboomer are about a girl named Suzanne who is constantly told she can't play sports that are supposed to be "boy sports". If you like stories about determination, hard work, and winners this is the series for you! - I also read this back 20 years ago and even still have my copies. Fantastic BOOK!

I found this book fascinating. I had read Michael Lewis' earlier book "Liar's Poker", about his dealings on Wall Street. What struck me most was how he brought his free-market capitalism frame of reference to the world of Major League Baseball and found that for a small group avant-garde managers, the same basic rules apply. Buy low, sell high, don't listen to market hype, and never get emotional. This book might be disturbing to people who have a lifetime love of the pure game, but Major League Baseball is also a business and has to be acknowledged as such.

So I'm a big fan of fantasy baseball. And for those that are as well, you know that playing the fantasy game changes the way you look at everything. Moneyball has the same effect. It just revolutionizes your outlook on the game of baseball. The "important" stats like RBIs and runs are replaced with really important ones, like OBP and pitches per at bat. No name guys like Scott Hatteberg become cogs that make teams great.

Michael Lewis crafts a book that is engaging on several levels -- to the baseball fan, the economist, and the statistician.

Ever wonder why we give more credit statistically to a guy that bloops a single just out of a poor fielder's reach vs. the guy that smashes a homerun, but is robbed by an amazing leaping catch? This book answers those sorts of questions. And it does so through the amazingly in depth looks at the mind of Billy Beane, the genius that built the A's, renowned for their ability to find talent that other teams miss.

I would highly recommend this book to any fan of baseball on any level. It's a truly great book, and one that will leave you feeling a bit like you stumbled upon a little known secret. You'll suddenly rush and start analyzing the latest pickups of your favorite team. You'll feel compelled to run out and follow the career of guys you'd never heard of before reading the book (and hint...they don't get on SportsCenter that often...). No regrets after reading this, and I promise it will be staying on my shelf for a long time.

My 15 yr. old son is currently reading it. He can't put it down and he is not an avid reader. He is a baseball nut who not only follows the sport but plays it in high school and hopefully college in a few years. Everyone who catches a glimpse of him reading Moneyball raves about the book themselves. It's an A+ in this mom's book.

I love sports. I love business, finance, and statistics. I've never been a baseball fan. This book was very well written to appeal to a very broad audience with a wide variety of backgrounds on the topic. The principle observations are delivered through expert story telling around very compelling central figures.

Without flowery language or paragraph after paragraph of adjectives - Lewis recounts experiences and conversations with such clarity that you can almost see, smell, and hear the scenes unfolding.

I won't look at baseball or the exploitation of market inefficiencies the same after having read this book. I'd recommend this book to anyone with intellectual curiosity.

Baseball is a game that nerds can really enjoy, largely because of the availability of abundant and meaningful statistics. Back in the 1970s the basic numbers could be obtained through books that were published every year, but a small group of super-geeks began looking more deeply into the mathematics of the game and developing their own metrics for rating players. These guys were mostly self-taught statisticians and motivated entirely by an obsessive passion for the game. I'm talking about people like Bill James, who a few decades ago was a security guard who began publishing really interesting and well-written analyses of baseball statistics in his famous Bill James Baseball Abstracts.

Of course baseball is also fun to watch, even for those who don't enjoy crunching numbers in their spare time. That's why it's a multibillion dollar business, and that's where the influence of the Jamesians gets really interesting. The thing is that for the sport's first 100 or so years the process of locating and recruiting talented players was based entirely on the gut instinct of the scouts employed by each team. These guys were mostly ex-players who made decisions based on notions that had nothing to do with (and often conflicted completely with) the available evidence. (The fact that the world is run almost entirely by people who think this way makes this book all the more insightful.)

Moneyball highlights the success of General Manager Billy Beane, who was able to run a very successful team for many years on a low budget by adapting the statistical approach. Interestingly, Beane was a player who was highly touted by the old-school scouts who employed the conventional criteria (which apparently amounted to something like imagining how the player would look on a baseball card). Beane's struggled throughout the 1990s to bring baseball into the 20th century, and he has had a substantial impact on the game, although any fan who watches the sport in 2008 will tell you that old habits die hard.

This is my pick for the best sports book ever written, and the reason is because it transcends sports. It captures the mood and feel of small town America as well as any book since Larry McMurtry's The LAST PICTURE SHOW. What Bissinger describes about the so-called pinnacle of life in western Texas, playing for the local team, applies just as well to high school athletes in Ohio or Pennsylvania. The flip side, of course, is once the ride is over, so is your worth to the community.

Great, great read.

Since I am not into football, this book was a long read for me. It could have been halved and the story complete.

Not sure what was worse, reading this 'item' or pounding my head against a concrete wall. It has received much fan-fare, and I don't know why, it's best described as...trite.

This book is good, but not great. Listening to the rants and raves of Bissinger's politics is painful, but it can be battled through if you're patient.

I was excited to read this book, to learn about the lives and the environment of football in a completely different context than the rest of us can witness. The excitement quickly dwindled as the author lost track of the actual story, and puts his own "journalistic" spin on the entire story. In the epilogue Bissinger claims that he had to report what he saw, as he had to be the responsible journalist, and from his writing it is clear that he is a typical, one side of the story journalist. Normally, I wouldn't let his clear bias affect the quality of the football story, but it became impossible to ignore, after chapter after chapter of clearly one-sided views of western Texas.

He openly mocks the fervor that the Odessa area has for George H. Bush page after page, who was running for President during this time. He makes fun of the lack of Democrats, the Texas religious beliefs, and the conservative values as if it's a complete crime that Texas supports one of its own. He doesn't even mention that Bush lived in Midland until halfway through the book, after chapters of mockery.

His view on the oil industry is completely laughable. Again, he mocks western Texas for being so foolish as to support Ronald Regan, who acted as a villain to western Texas by - ready for this - lowering oil prices. Bissinger thinks that lowering oil prices is a travesty that deserves the harshest of penalty, and that Texans are gullible for believing in the free market. If George Bush acted this way, would he be treated the same today? I wonder what Bissenger's attitude toward lowering oil prices would be now?

The football aspect is done well, with the lives of the football players, how much Permian football means to them, and the troubled and sometimes tragic life in Odessa, Texas.

Friday Night Lights
A Town, A Team, and A Dream
By H.G. Bissinger

By Cael Kiess

H.G. Bissinger spent over a year getting to know the people of Odessa, Texas. During that year he spoke with Permian football players, their families, and Odessa citizens in his attempt to write a book that told the story of how one team of teenage kids could inspire an entire town. Bissinger, an American journalist, has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the National Headliner Award, and the American Bar Association's Silver gavel for his reporting. He is also the author of A Prayer for the City, and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Bissinger did a great job accomplishing his goal of reliving the wild journey of the 1988 Permian football season and the struggles off the field. He vividly portrays the racism through schools in Odessa County, the oil booms, typical school days of Permian football players, the Mojo Fanatics, and Friday Nights in late August. One chapter, "The Watermelon Feed," really describes the passion and devotion of Permian football fans and Mojo Fanatics. Bissinger writes, "The faithful sat on little stools of orange and blue under the lights of the high school cafeteria, but the setting didn't bother them a bit. Had the Watermelon Feed been held inside a county jail, or on a sinking ship, or on the side of a craggy mountain, they would still have flocked to attend and support their team." This description allows me to feel like I'm actually there and helps me sense the amount of pride and dedication given to Permian football by the fans. He also gives a second look farther into the town of Odessa, off the football field, enhancing a better view of what was occurring in the town of Odessa and its neighboring towns. There were many highlights and struggles happening in the streets and classrooms that one would not be able to find out in just the movie. One weakness of the book is the possible effect of losing the reader through the ongoing descriptions and passages of events, people, and struggles in Odessa. There is not as much of the actual football games incorporated into the book as one would think from watching the movie. In the book, Bissinger does a marvelous job describing the life and events of the 1988 Permian football players and the Mojo fans.