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Fellow Athletes Praise Naomi Osaka As She Reveals Mental Health Struggles : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ther-athletes-rally-around-her us Pandemic Culture
shared by carolinehayter on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Many of the world's top athletes have rallied around tennis star Naomi Osaka and her decision to pull out of the French Open — decrying a culture that doesn't always give athletes the support they need in times of mental distress.
  • Support from Osaka's fellow athletes soon poured in, often tinged with knowing frustration at systems that don't prioritize competitors' well-being.
  • I announced it preemptively because I do feel like the rules are quite outdated in parts and I wanted to highlight that."
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  • When the four-time Grand Slam champion said she wouldn't take part in required press conferences due to concerns over her mental health, officials responded by fining her $15,000 and threatening to expel her from the tournament.Osaka, 23, then pulled out of the French Open entirely, revealing in a statement that her decision not to talk to reporters was due to struggles she has experienced in recent years:
  • Basketball Hall of Famer Lisa Leslie lamented that Osaka was penalized rather than aided when she expressed her mental health needs.
  • Osaka's competitors on the court rallied around her, too.
  • This is a crucial moment in culture and in sport, Brennan said, because sports often drive important national and international conversations that otherwise might not happen – such as this one, on mental health.
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Transgender athlete sues USA Powerlifting over competition ban - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...-over-competition-ban-n1253960
shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Transgender powerlifter JayCee Cooper is suing USA Powerlifting, the sport's biggest U.S.-based organization, after it barred her from competition on the basis of her gender identity.
  • "It came as a surprise to me that when I applied to compete at my first competition, I was told that I couldn't compete specifically because I'm a trans woman,"
  • The International Olympic Committee adopted guidelines in 2015 permitting trans women to compete if their testosterone remains below a certain level for at least 12 months.
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  • Cooper's lawsuit says she was rejected from competing even though she provided documentation that her testosterone levels had remained under the IOC's accepted limit for two years.
  • "USAPL denied Ms. Cooper's eligibility to compete because she is a transgender woman, withdrew her competition card because she is a transgender woman, and then went on to adopt a categorical ban on participation by transgender women athletes at USAPL competitions,"
  • "USA Powerlifting is not a fit for every athlete and for every medical condition or situation," the organization's Transgender Participation Policy states. "Simply, not all powerlifters are eligible to compete in USA Powerlifting."
  • The policy says USA Powerlifting is a "sports organization with rules and policies" that "apply to everyone to provide a level playing field."
  • "Men naturally have a larger bone structure, higher bone density, stronger connective tissue and higher muscle density than women," it says. "These traits, even with reduced levels of testosterone do not go away. While MTF [male-to-female] may be weaker and less muscle than they once were, the biological benefits given them at birth still remain over than of a female."
  • Cooper said Tuesday that she began lifting in 2018 and said training her body for the sport empowered her in ways she couldn't previously have imagined
  • "As a trans person, this took on additional meaning, because our bodies are so politicized and demonized regularly," she said.
  • "There are a myriad of factors that help determine someone's success in competition," Erin Maye Quade, advocacy director at Gender Justice, said Tuesday. "Anti-trans propaganda's fixation on a single factor lays bare their plot to perpetuate rigid ideas about how women are supposed to look and sound and act."
  • "I grew up pursuing Olympic dreams, and that was taken away from me in the sport of powerlifting," Cooper said. "I don't want anyone to experience what I and other trans athletes have and continue to experience."
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Ohio Teen Cross Country Athlete Disqualified Over Hijab | Time - 0 views

time.com/...country-hijab-disqualification history culture us
shared by anniina03 on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The association that oversees high school sports in Ohio said Thursday that it’s considering changing its rules after a high school runner was disqualified from a cross country meet because she didn’t have a waiver allowing her to wear a hijab.
  • Noor Abukaram said she felt humiliated after being disqualified last weekend following a race in which she posted her best time for the season. “My heart dropped, I felt like something horrible had happened,”
  • The Ohio High School Athletic Association’s rulebook doesn’t specifically mention hijabs but does ban most head coverings and caps. It also says anyone requiring an exception because of religious or other reasons must get a waiver. The athletic association previously discussed dropping the waiver requirement for religious headwear, but the disqualification has now brought the issue to the forefront
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  • Similar issues have come up in other states in recent years. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association voted last year to drop its waiver requirement after a high school basketball player in Philadelphia was forced to leave a game because she was wearing a hijab.
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Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...g-locations-hundreds-thousands surveillance college tech culture privacy
shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”
  • And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”
  • Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.
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  • The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.
  • A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people’s activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize.
  • “Graduates will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems,” one commenter on the Slashdot message board said. “Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984.”
  • Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day.
  • The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed
  • “These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a student population because it serves their interests, in terms of the scholarships that come out of their budget, the reputation of their programs, the statistics for the school,”
  • one feeling is almost universally shared, according to interviews with more than a dozen students and faculty members: that the technology is becoming ubiquitous, and that the people being monitored — their peers, and themselves — can’t really do anything about it.
  • “We’re reinforcing this sense of powerlessness … when we could be asking harder questions, like: Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?”
  • SpotterEDU chief Rick Carter, a former college basketball coach, said he founded the app in 2015 as a way to watch over student athletes: Many schools already pay “class checkers” to make sure athletes remain eligible to play.
  • “Students today have so many distractions,” said Tami Chievous, an associate athletic director at the University of Missouri, where advisers text some freshmen athletes if they don’t show up within five minutes of class. “We have to make sure they’re doing the right thing.”
  • Students’ attendance and tardiness are scored into a point system that some professors use for grading, Carter said, and schools can use the data to “take action” against truant students, such as grabbing back scholarship funds
  • For even more data, schools can turn to the Austin-based start-up Degree Analytics, which uses WiFi check-ins to track the movements of roughly 200,000 students across 19 state universities, private colleges and other schools.
  • Benz tells school administrators that his system can solve “a real lack of understanding about the student experience”: By analyzing campus WiFi data, he said, 98 percent of their students can be measured and analyzed.
  • A classifier algorithm divides the student body into peer groups — “full-time freshmen,” say, or “commuter students” — and the system then compares each student to “normal” behavior, as defined by their peers. It also generates a “risk score” for students based around factors such as how much time they spent in community centers or at the gym.
  • Some administrators love the avalanche of data these kinds of WiFi-based systems bring. “Forget that old ominous line, ‘We know where you live.’ These days, it’s, ‘We know where you are,’ ” Purdue University president Mitch Daniels wrote last year about his school’s location-tracking software. “Isn’t technology wonderful?”
  • If these systems work so well in college, administrators might argue, why not high school or anywhere else?
  • He now says he wishes schools would share the data with parents, too. “I just cut you a $30,000 check,” he said, “and I can’t find out if my kid’s going to class or not?”
  • Some parents, however, wish their children faced even closer supervision. Wes Grandstaff, who said his son, Austin, transformed from a struggling student to college graduate with SpotterEDU’s help, said the added surveillance was worth it: “When you’re a college athlete, they basically own you, so it didn’t matter what he felt: You’re going to get watched and babysat whether you like it or not.”
  • Joanna Grama, an information-security consultant and higher-education specialist who has advised the Department of Homeland Security on data privacy, said she doubted most students knew they were signing up for long-term monitoring when they clicked to connect to the campus WiFi.
  • “At what point in time do we start crippling a whole generation of adults, human beings, who have been so tracked and told what to do all the time that they don’t know how to fend for themselves?” she said. “Is that cruel? Or is that kind?”
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U.S. Will Not Punish Olympic Athletes for Peaceful Protests - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-olympic-protests.html
shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The U.S. committee’s announcement was made in conjunction with a formal recommendation from a council led by American athletes that asked the I.O.C. to change its policy, known as Rule 50, while working on justice causes.
  • “It is critical to state unequivocally that human rights are not political, and peaceful calls for equity and equality must not be confused with divisive demonstrations,” Sarah Hirshland, chief executive of the U.S.O.P.C.
  • Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter prohibits individuals from demonstrating or displaying “political, religious or racial propaganda” around Olympic sites during the Games.
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  • at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, when the American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith were expelled from the Games for raising their fists on the medals podium during the playing of the U.S. national anthem.
  • For now, the change in policy from the U.S.O.P.C. does not mean that American athletes will be free to protest at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo next year without the threat of punishment.
  • In practice, the I.O.C. has historically called on individual organizing committees to dole out punishments for violations.
  • Because the U.S. is a big market and a big national Olympic committee, “it does make a difference in terms of what the discourse is going to be at the I.O.C. around this issue,”
  • The U.S.O.P.C.’s split from the I.O.C. on this rule comes at a delicate time, with the Olympics set to take place in Los Angeles in 2028.
  • “As long as they do it respectfully, with due deference that there will be other athletes on that podium with them, I am not going to get sleepless nights on this.”
  • The I.O.C. clarified its rule last January, specifying that kneeling or raising a fist during a medal ceremony was a form of demonstration that would not be tolerated.
  • “When you specify kneeling and you talk about fists when you’re defining what protest can and can’t be, you’re saying you don’t want Black athletes to come,” Moushaumi Robinson, a gold medalist in track and field who leads the Team U.S.A.
  • “Once the clock is at double zero, once the race finishes, the three individuals or three teams, they own that time, and it is their time to express or not express, to do or not do, to stand or not stand, in that moment that they’ve earned.”
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At Beijing Olympics, Question of Free Speech Looms Over Athletes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...olympics-china-protests.html international china
shared by lucieperloff on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • As competitions began in a Winter Olympics overshadowed by controversy over China’s record on human rights, the issue of what participants can and cannot say has loomed larger than at any Olympics in years.
  • China’s Communist Party has also warned that athletes are subject not only to Olympic rules, but also to Chinese law. The warnings have been part of a crackdown in the weeks before Friday’s opening ceremony that, critics say, has had a chilling effect on dissent inside and outside the Olympic bubble.
  • Some national teams, including the United States and Canada, have warned their athletes there is potential legal jeopardy in speaking out — from both the International Olympic Committee and the Chinese judicial system.
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  • Within the Olympic community, the limits of political speech have become increasingly contested, a debate that has intensified with the Games in China, which routinely ranks among the world’s most repressive in surveys on political, religious and other freedoms.
  • Political activism has surfaced at many international events, including the Tokyo Olympics last summer, but no other host nation has been as strict as China in policing political dissent.
  • In fact, protests among Olympic athletes are rare, even among those who may sympathize with human-rights causes. Most athletes are zealously focused on their sport, having devoted years of training to have the chance to compete at the highest level.
  • Beijing 2022’s organizers have pledged to honor the Olympic Charter’s spirit to allow freedom of speech. Within the “closed loop” bubbles erected around Olympic venues, the authorities have created an open internet not restricted by China’s censorship.
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What athletes know about Donald Trump (opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • What athletes know about Donald Trump
  • Now, however, at least three members of the Patriots have said they won't go to the White House to meet President Donald Trump. Defensive back Devin McCourty and tight end Martellus Bennett, both of whom were supportive of Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protest throughout the regular season, declared they would not accompany their teammates for the ritual photo-op with the president.
  • Sports are part of the political spectrum. And as Bennett, McCourty and Hightower are trying to demonstrate, it's important for us to listen to athletes for a change.
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Up to 10 refugees to compete at Rio Games: IOC | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...refugees-compete-rio-games-ioc refugees rio games msnbc
shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Up to 10 refugees to compete at Rio Games: IOC
  • A team of refugees that will compete at this year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics could number as many as 10 athletes, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach on Wednesday.
  • The team, which was officially approved by the IOC Executive Board and called Team of Refugee Olympics Athletes (ROA), will be made up from a pool of 43 prospective Olympians
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  • Nomination criteria included sporting level, official United Nations-verified refugee status and personal situation and background, the IOC said.
  • “It depends very much on the sporting qualifications. This team may end up between five and 10 athletes maybe.”
  • Hundreds of thousands of refugees, many from Syria, have crossed via Turkey and Greece into Europe.
  • “By welcoming ROA to the Olympic Games in Rio, we want to send a message of hope to all the refugees of the world,” Bach said.
  • “Having no national team to belong to, having no flag to march behind, having no national anthem to be played, these refugees will be welcomed to the Olympic Games with the Olympic flag and with the Olympic anthem
  • ROA will be housed in the athletes’ village along with all other national teams and will enter the stadium as the penultimate team at the opening ceremony, ahead of the host nation.
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Olympic Organizers Say They're Ready For COVID-19 Risks, But Japan's Doctors Are Wary :... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...yo-olympics-should-be-canceled
shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Athletes have begun to arrive in Tokyo in preparation for the Summer Olympics, set to begin on July 23, despite warnings from many Japanese doctors that the games should be canceled.Japanese officials and members of the International Olympic Committee continue to insist the games will go on safely.
  • The Olympic Games were postponed last year because of the pandemic. This year, thousands of physicians cite a surge in infections in Japan in warning that there is no capacity to handle possible outbreaks. Last week, Japan's government extended a state of emergency covering major cities through at least June 20.
  • The IOC says 80% of athletes in the Olympic Village will be vaccinated — though vaccinations will not be required — and outside the village, less than 3% of the population will be. A recent poll by a Japanese newspaper found that 83% of respondents favor canceling or postponing the games.
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  • Why not move the Summer Games to 2022?
  • The organizers have announced that the games will take place without any international spectators, and they're considering banning all spectators. A big part of the Olympics is people from around the world coming together to watch them in person. Tell me about why you think it's still worth hosting the games.
  • So if you ask most athletes, would you rather have live spectators when you're competing or not? Most would say yes. [If asked] well, if we can't have any spectators, should we cancel the games? They'd say, oh, my God, no, no, no. Heavens, don't even think about that. What's really important is the competition. And we can certainly live without spectators if that's the price of doing it in a pandemic context
  • It's important to athletes. I understand that. It also is about, I would imagine, keeping sponsors and TV networks happy. There's a lot of money in the Olympics, and that's going to lead to some charges that money is at the center of pushing this thing forward as opposed to wisdom about the outbreak of a very dangerous virus.
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How to predict winners at the winter Olympics | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...winners-at-the-winter-olympics culture policy
shared by woodlu on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The strongest countries have arrived with ambitious medal targets and will be keeping track of their chances of matching those tallies throughout the games. Until recently working out who was likely to win an Olympic event was a guessing game based on hunches and limited data.
  • Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.
  • The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.
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  • A handful of financial institutions produced them when Rio de Janeiro hosted in 2016, using a mixture of macroeconomic indicators and performances at previous Olympics to forecast total medal hauls for each country.
  • Gracenote’s distinguishing feature is the ability to produce quantitative analysis for each event.
  • The company has created a performance index that tracks around 500 events across the various sports in the summer and winter Olympic programmes.
  • Gracenote still uses the old system to produce its public medal table, which also deals in absolute forecasts, rather than fractional ones. If a French athlete, say, is the most likely to win an event, France gets awarded one gold medal in the table, even though the true probability of the athlete winning gold is less than 100% and his chances of claiming silver and bronze are greater than 0%.
  • the Elo rating system, which was developed for chess by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian physicist. The formula exchanges ranking points from the loser to the winner, with greater rewards for beating stronger opponents. The difference in ratings points between two rivals can be easily used to calculate the probability that one will beat the other.
  • Yet only two events on the winter Olympics programme, curling and ice hockey, involve head-to-head contests.
  • Gracenote devised an Elo-style mechanism with modifications. Rather than simply measuring whether an athlete wins or loses a competition, the system predicts the share of opponents that he beats. If he finishes higher than expected, based on his previous rating and the strength of the field for the competition in question, his rating improves.
  • Those that compete in teams have their scores blended with their compatriots. And for those that participate in a number of events, such as Ms Dahlmeier, results in related disciplines affect multiple ratings. A strong performance in the biathlon sprint, a group race, would boost her ranking in the pursuit, a staggered race, for example.
  • The best way to answer that question is to take every previous contest in the sport and analyse how past results correlate with future success.
  • The bans have benefited Norway most, as the country will likely gain of the five of the 12 foregone medals—enough to nudge it ahead of Germany into first place in terms of total medals won.
  • Mr Gleave notes that the favourite only wins about 30% of the time, a lower share than in any other winter sport. Ms Dahlmeier’s rating has dwindled a little, but not by enough to suggest that last year’s record breaker has become this year’s flop.
  • Gracenote’s research into age curves for each sport shows that the best biathletes can maintain their peak performance into their early 30s (see chart). Expect to see more event-by-event forecasting at future Olympics, too.
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Olympics Security Worries U.S. Officials - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ecurity-at-sochi-olympics.html olympics security u s nytimes putin
shared by Conner Armstrong on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The separate remarks, made on Sunday morning news programs, came before a video was released online showing two young men who said they were behind suicide bombings in the central Russian city Volgograd last month that claimed 34 lives. In the video, the men threaten to carry out more attacks. In a statement posted with the video on its website, the militant group Vilayat Dagestan claimed responsibility for the Volgograd bombings, The Associated Press reported.
  • “They’re not giving us the full story about, what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups — the terrorist groups who have had some success — are they still plotting?”
  • “If necessary, all those tools will be activated.” He added that if foreign athletes wanted to provide their own additional security, “there is nothing wrong with that,” as long as they coordinated with the Russian authorities.
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  • Meanwhile, amid complaints from foreign athletes and officials about Russia’s nationwide ban last year on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” which makes it a crime to mention homosexuality around minors, Mr. Putin said visitors had nothing to fear.
  • In this country, everybody is absolutely equal to anybody else, irrespective of one’s religion, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” he said. “Everybody is equal. So no concerns exist for people who intend to come as athletes or visitors to the Olympics.”
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She Had to Tell What She Knew - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...had-to-tell-what-she-knew.html sports university standards academic
shared by Javier E on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • right from the start, she realized that there was a problem: Many of the athletes were coming into college unequipped to do college-level work. Around 2008, she recalls, after the N.C.A.A. changed its eligibility requirements — depending on their G.P.A.’s, athletes could now get in with lower S.A.T. scores — the situation became dramatically worse.
  • she alleged that, of 183 North Carolina football and basketball players she had researched since 2005, 60 percent read between the fourth- and eighth-grade levels, and between 8 percent and 10 percent read below the third-grade level.
  • “I’ve become a reformer,” she said. “I want to see the N.C.A.A. machinery dismantled. I want faculties to take back their universities from the athletic departments.
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High School Football Inc. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...high-school-football-inc.html football high school sports
shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.
  • convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.
  • Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.
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  • IMG is at the forefront. It is trying to enhance its academy brand with football, perhaps the most visible sport. And it is applying a business model to the gridiron that has long been profitable for tennis and has expanded to golf, soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track and field. The academy has nearly 1,000 students from more than 80 countries enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade and postgraduation. About half the students are international.
  • Although it is private, IMG Academy has received more than $7 million from the Florida state budget over the past two years, according to news accounts. An additional $2 million was pledged by lawmakers in June but was then vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott.
  • The full cost of tuition and boarding for a year of football at IMG Academy is $70,800, although need-based financial assistance is available. School officials would not provide specific figures, but they said that payments by families could range from tens of thousands of dollars to a competition fee (between $3,750 and $4,500) to nothing.
  • IMG bought the academy in 1987, and it now covers more than 500 acres. Football began in 2013 as part of a $197 million campus expansion. Games are played in a 5,000-seat stadium outfitted with suites and a jumbo video screen. Digital screens depict each player’s name and face on his locker. Some N.F.L. players train there in the off-season, as do college players preparing for the pro draft.
  • The school, 45 miles south of Tampa, recruits football players from around the country, offering high-performance training, college preparatory courses, coaches with N.F.L. playing experience, facilities that resemble a small college more than a high school, and a chance to play a national schedule and on national television on ESPN against some of the country’s highest-rated teams.
  • “We run a business,” said Chip McCarthy, a co-managing director of IMG Academy. “We call it sales and marketing. Some people call it recruiting. We’re promoting our program. If you look at any private school that emphasizes sports, they’re typically doing it to promote their school. A lot are trying to survive. You’re not going to curtail that.”
  • Many high school football coaches and officials are closely following IMG Academy, wondering whether it portends the growth of similar academies or superleagues featuring top teams.
  • “I’m 50-50 split,” said John Wilkinson, the coach at Cocoa High School, who faced IMG Academy last week and said he would do it again. “They’re high school kids, just like us. We’re playing a football game. The other 50 percent thinks the competitive advantage they have is kind of alarming, if they’re allowed to recruit. But it is what it is.”
  • Other officials express fear that football might follow the path of high school basketball, which many feel has been corrupted by so-called diploma mills and the heavy influence of club teams and recruiting middlemen.
  • Mickey McCarty, who has coached three state championship teams at Neville High School in Monroe, La., and who lost a senior receiver to IMG Academy days before fall practice began, said the academy seemed less a traditional football team than a showcase for individual talent.
  • “It sounds to me like they’re playing for self, to be promoted and recruited, which takes away everything we stand for,” McCarty said.
  • Academy officials said that 186 athletes from IMG’s 2015 graduating class were playing various college sports, including six at Ivy League universities and four at service academies. Academics and athletics are intended to simulate the college experience with dormitory living, alternate-day classes, block scheduling and a focus on time management.
  • “I came here assuming it was going to be easy, it’s just going to be a football school, but I learned within the first week I was completely wrong,” said Kjetil Cline, 17, a senior receiver from Minnesota who plans to play football at the United States Military Academy. “That really opened my eyes about what college would be like, and I think it’s really prepared me for going to West Point and being able to handle that.”
  • “Academy teams, while they may be good teams and give great educations, it’s not something that we really believe in or would promote or espouse in any way. We think the high school experience is best served by the student-athlete who lives at home with his family and is part of his school, family and community.”
  • The players at IMG and their families consider that approach to be antiquated. For Patterson, a quarterback who won state championships the previous two seasons at a high school in Louisiana, IMG Academy is serving as a finishing school.
  • Patterson said he transferred to IMG in June to work on his speed, strength and conditioning. He plans to graduate in December, enroll for the spring semester at the University of Mississippi and challenge for the starting quarterback position there next fall as a freshman.“It’s definitely a professional decision,” he said.
  • teve Walsh, IMG Academy’s director of football, and Rich Bartel, the offensive coordinator, both played quarterback in the N.F.L. There are also sports psychologists, strength coaches and speed coaches to assist Patterson. He has at his disposal a 10,000-square-foot weight room; a sports science center to aid with hydration and nutrition; a biomechanics center; a vision lab, or “mind gym,” to enhance perceptual and cognitive skills; and a hospital for special surgery and sports rehabilitation should he be injured.
  • When IMG Academy played in Texas this month, it trained at Texas Christian University, and Wright, the Ascenders’ coach, said, “We’re thinking, ‘Hey, our practice fields are maybe a little bit better.’ ”
  • At the top levels of high school football, some teams routinely travel to play teams in other states. Games are frequently broadcast on regional or national cable channels. Some players are offered college scholarships as early as eighth grade.
  • “It’s all driven by money, and you can’t beat money,” said John Bachman Sr., who coached Patterson to state titles the past two seasons at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La. As a freshman, Patterson played at a high school in Texas.
  • Even so, he added, “I don’t think anything’s ever going to take the place of the local public high school or private school that pours itself into the kid, and it’s a family atmosphere and it’s about the team and sacrifice and so on.”
  • Sean Patterson Sr., Shea’s father, said, “If your son’s a great musician, you want to send him to Juilliard,” adding that for Shea, IMG Academy “is the spot” for polishing his football skills for college.
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Andrew Luck Got Wise, but Fans Weren't Keeping Up - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...596893 football injuries culture toughness macho
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • even the type of idealized athlete who drew many fans to football—the hard-nosed, rugged guy who repeatedly and eagerly sacrificed his body, enduring unimaginable pain for the sake of the game—has been pushed to the outer limits of what any human body can tolerate. The fame, wealth, and adulation that pro athletes receive are no longer enough to make them suffer in silence. For more and more athletes, the price of pain is getting way too high.
  • Not all fans are actually capable of seeing the humanity of the players they follow so closely. When the allure of the game is rooted in violence, and in conformity to whatever the team demands, players are treated as physical objects and nothing more
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I.O.C. and Japan Agree to Postpone Tokyo Olympics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...summer-olympics-postponed.html COVID-19 crisis culture economics politics
shared by brickol on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • After months of internal discussions and mounting pressure from nations and athletes across the world, the International Olympic Committee will postpone the Tokyo Games that had been scheduled to begin in late July, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan said Tuesday.
  • The Summer Games, the world’s largest sporting event, will instead take place sometime in 2021, a change that will likely wreak havoc with sports schedules but should bring great relief to the athletes, organizers and health officials who pressed for a delay and complained that the I.O.C. was not moving quickly enough to adjust to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • The decision became inevitable after the national Olympic committee in Canada announced on Sunday that it was withdrawing from the Games, and Australia’s committee told its athletes that it was not possible to train under the widespread restrictions in place to control the virus. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, after initially declining to take a stand, joined the fray Monday night, urging the I.O.C. to postpone.
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  • “I am disappointed,” Mori said. “But to be on course with a certain direction is a sigh of relief.” He added: “This could be a good pretext for us to go forward and we can prepare for an even better Olympic and Paralympic Games than what we have planned for this year.”That could include adjusting the dates to avoid the hottest weeks of the summer, a criticism Olympic organizers faced before the coronavirus threat developed into a pandemic.
  • Bach said the situation became untenable in recent days as the World Health Organization detailed the acceleration of the virus in Africa for Olympic leaders. That forced the I.O.C. to shift its focus from whether Japan could be safe at the start of the Games to what was happening immediately in various countries and continents.
  • The decision quickly gained the support of national Olympic committees from around the world. In a statement, Andy Anson, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, said a postponement was the only decision his organization could support. “It would have been unthinkable for us to continue to prepare for an Olympic Games at a time the nation and the world no less is enduring great hardship,” Anson said.
  • At a time when Japan’s economy is already stumbling, the delay of the Olympics could deal a serious blow. In a report early this month, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. projected that a cancellation of the Games would erase 1.4 percent of Japan’s economic output.Advertisement
  • Until now, the Olympics had not been canceled or postponed since World War II. Tokyo was supposed to host the Summer Games in 1940 but had to bow out after it went to war with China. The Games were then awarded to Helsinki, but were canceled after the outbreak of the war in Europe. Helsinki ultimately hosted the 1952 Summer Games, and Tokyo held them in 1964.
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The Ivy League was first to cancel sports. Here's what it says about when games might r... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...obin-harris-executive-director sports ivy pandemic policy
shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “If we don’t have students in dorms, if we don’t have students on campus, I don’t see how we would ever have athletics competition,” Harris said. “That, to me, seems the threshold: When do students come back?
  • “You have the students back, let’s say. Does that mean we can return to normal athletics competition with what we expect in terms of fan attendance, or are we going to have to have some limitations on fan attendance? … You kind of have to peel it back in reverse order. If we can have the athletic teams interacting, then can we have competition? Can we have travel to allow the competition to occur? And can we have fans?”
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Trump Attacks Warriors' Curry. LeBron James's Retort: 'U Bum.' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-nfl-kaepernick.html Us history Trump politics NBA Lebron James NFL Steph Curry
shared by millerco on 24 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Trump Attacks Warriors’ Curry. LeBron James’s Retort: ‘U Bum.’
  • President Trump took aim at two of the world’s most powerful sports leagues and some of their most popular athletes, directly inserting himself into an already fiery debate over race, social justice and athlete activism and stoking a running battle on social media over his comments.
  • In a speech on Friday and a series of tweets on Saturday, he urged N.F.L. owners to fire players who do not stand for the national anthem, suggested that football is declining because it is not as violent as it once was and seemed to disinvite the N.B.A. champion Golden State Warriors from the traditional White House visit because of their star player Stephen Curry’s public opposition to him.
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  • the president used an expletive to describe players who kneel or sit during the anthem to protest police brutality against black Americans and other forms of social injustice.
  • “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,’ ” the president said at a rally for Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed to the Senate this year and is facing Roy Moore in a Republican primary runoff.
  • “U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” Mr. James wrote on Twitter.
  • The Warriors, who play in a league that sometimes promotes social issues and whose owners and players have been known to denounce the president, said in a statement they would use a visit to Washington in February to highlight issues of diversity and inclusiveness.
  • By midafternoon, a spokesman for the University of North Carolina national championship basketball team confirmed the team would not be going to the White House
  • Many athletes have been moved to comment on race and social justice more frequently in the past year after a series of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans and the support Mr. Trump has received from white supremacists.
  • “It’s unfortunate that the president decided to use his immense platform to make divisive and offensive statements about our players and the N.F.L.,’’ said Mark Murphy, the president and chief executive of the Green Bay Packers.
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Japan Extends 3rd State Of Emergency Weeks Before Olympics : Coronavirus Updates : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eeks-before-the-olympics-begin pandemic Culture politics
shared by carolinehayter on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • Japan's government extended a state of emergency covering major cities until at least until June 20 — roughly a month before the start of the Tokyo Olympics, which polls show an overwhelming number of Japanese do not want to proceed as scheduled.
  • It's Japan's third state of emergency of the pandemic and the second extension since the current emergency began on April 25. The emergency shortens some businesses' hours, and caps attendance at large events
  • The spread in Japan of variant strains of the virus has slowed the decline in case numbers. Some hospitals remain overstretched by COVID-19 patients, and some people have died at home without being able to access medical care.
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  • Japan's vaccine rollout remains the slowest among developed economies with just 6% of residents having received at least one dose.
  • An article this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, meanwhile, questioned organizers' fundamental argument that the games can be held safely. "We believe the IOC's determination to proceed with the Olympic Games is not informed by the best scientific evidence," the authors wrote.
  • International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach told a conference on Thursday that athletes should "come with full confidence to Tokyo and get ready," lauding the Japanese capital as "the best-prepared Olympic city ever."
  • The IOC has asked Olympic athletes to sign waivers absolving the organizers of legal liability for COVID-19-related risks. Bach acknowledged this was an issue of concern for some athletes, but the IOC calls it "standard practice."
  • Japan requires that imported vaccines undergo domestic clinical testing, slowing down the approval process.
  • Japan's second-largest newspaper by circulation, The Asahi Shimbun, became the first major Japanese media outlet to publish an editorial calling for the games to be canceled. The 142-year-old publication, one of Asia's oldest newspapers, is also an Olympic sponsor.
  • Sponsors are especially jittery about the prospect of the games' cancellation, which could cost Japan an estimated $17 billion.
  • another state of emergency in response to a fresh wave of infections after the Olympics could cost the country several times that amount.
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Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
  • That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
  • In attempting to force her hand, they essentially forced her out. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Get CNN Opinion's newsletter for the latest thoughts and analysis on today's news.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376914 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campa
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  • But Open organizers didn't stop there, issuing a news release threatening to expel her from the tournament if she kept it up.
  • And so, she quit. Read More
  • Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
  • Osaka first came into the spotlight at the 2018 US Open when her historic win against Serena Williams received boos from a crowd convinced that Williams was unfairly targeted by the umpire. What should have been an extraordinarily joyous occasion, her first major victory and the event that catapulted her into public recognition, was instead one that made her cry, both immediately following the match and when she went to collect her trophy. ESPN declared that "Naomi Osaka was denied her magic moment."
  • Simply put, it's because the world has unrealistic expectations of celebrities and athletes. We believe the public nature of their fame entitles us access to their private lives. In several recent interviews, such as one with podcaster Dax Shepard, Prince Harry has talked openly of his own mental health struggles and of the pressures he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have felt as objects of media fascination, pressures so severe that Markle thought of suicide.
  • Many of her fellow athletes agreed with her decision. Steph Curry tweeted, "you shouldn't ever have to make a decision like this -- but so damn impressive taking the high road when the powers that be don't protect their own. major respect @naomiosaka." Martina Navratilova tweeted her support of Osaka, noting that "as athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental & emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference." Serena Williams offered her support, too.
  • Some tennis players, of course -- including Rafael Nadal and Sofia Kenin -- have come out to say that speaking to reporters is part of the job. But just because something has been part of the job needn't mean it should be, or that it should be for everyone. Osaka didn't just decide she didn't feel like giving interviews. She was forced to make a choice, and she chose herself. That takes courage, courage that is a shame she had to muster at all. Because in the end, the tennis world has lost a great, at least for now -- a point that deserves much more attention.
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From the Civil War to the football field, we have been celebrating the wrong values - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-been-celebrating-wrong-values civil war football sport white supremacy racism role model history
shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Hallowell “was a power in Harvard athletics,” according to one of the earliest histories of football, who enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 just after graduating. But what you can be sure of is that he was a hell of a rower and a swimmer. During the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, the 22-year-old swam across the Potomac River three times through bullet-pocked water to rescue trapped and wounded comrades.
  • Pen Hallowell had something more than physical courage, and so did his elder brother, Edward “Ned” Needles Hallowell. “The Fighting Quakers,” as they were nicknamed, were sons of a Philadelphia abolitionist whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As boys they spirited fugitive slaves to safety in the family carriage. As men they volunteered as officers with the legendary all-black 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments.
  • While those men were towing a locomotive by ropes, Pen Hallowell was beating in the doors of Congress trying to get them paid equal to white soldiers. The 54th and 55th were offered just $7 a month, while white soldiers got $13. Largely thanks to the brothers’ efforts, Congress finally approved equal pay for black soldiers in 1864.
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  • As for Ned Hallowell, he was shot three times charging with the left wing of the martyred 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, just behind his doomed friend Robert Gould Shaw. With Shaw’s body lying in a sandy ditch with his troops, Ned Hallowell assumed command of the regiment. Assigned the rear guard during a perilous retreat in a battle called Olustee, he and his men spent 20,000 cartridges checking the Confederates and then countermarched to save a train of intermingled black and white wounded soldiers that had broken down. When they couldn’t fix the motor, they attached ropes to the engine cars and manually hauled that bloody train to safety, with Confederate gunfire guttering at their backs.
  • Then there was that Princeton academic and assistant football coach named Woodrow Wilson, who rewrote the Civil War in volumes of purported American history so racist that they enraged Hallowell because they so “abounded with apologies for slavery.”
  • The vague phrase “systemic racism” is not just perpetuated by men with badges. It’s also propagated by our false victory narratives. There have been few more powerful cultural narrators than the NFL and the NCAA, with their close association with military triumphalism. They have been terrible teachers of historical truth, lousy with misplaced definitions of valor
  • Pen Hallowell was alive to hear Harvard football coach W. Cameron Forbes declare in 1900 that American football was “the expression of strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of the dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hope of permanence.”
  • every well-meaning but unread white athlete, coach, owner, athletic director and sportswriter needs to understand that Pen Hallowell, to whom black lives really did matter, lost his war. And football had no small part in that.
  • Hallowell tried to fight back in the post-war battle of values. He wrote essays and speeches devoted to the bravery of black soldiers and those conscientious outliers, abolitionists. On Memorial Day in 1896, he gave a remembrance address at Harvard. Sickened by romantic war myths in which the treachery and slave-driving of the Confederacy were painted over as cavalier spirit, Hallowell said, “To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war.”
  • Yet isn’t that what we have done? We have degraded that war — to the point that we hardly know what real honor is anymore, much less how to coach it on our playing fields.
  • Degraded it to the point that Pen Hallowell has faded to a relative obscurity, except among war buffs and historians, while the University of Mississippi kept Colonel Reb as a mascot until 2003. Even now frat boys will dress in the costumes of traitors to the flag at cotillions, without the first blush of hot shame
  • If we want football to be something worth preserving, we should demand that it celebrates the right qualities — and people.
  • most important is what Hallowell has to teach about courage and protest. “The courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order,” Hallowell wrote. He saw a “higher and rarer courage” in the “long suffering and patient endurance” of the soldiers so invested in their equal pay protest that they fought for 18 months without accepting a cent until they won fair treatment.
  • Hallowell and his brother are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., with headstones so small they seem like chips compared with Confederate monuments. When Hallowell finally died in 1914, his close friend and compatriot Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called him “the most generously gallant spirit, and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew.” If there was a peerless man who deserves to be on a height, it’s Pen Hallowell. Yet look what we have done to him. Look what we have done to all of us.
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