Sports Lit

In this article, parental pressure is described as a “growing intrusion,” and goes on to explain the many ways that parental pressure affects the athletes on the US swim team.  This article shows that parents of some of the best, such as Michael Phelps, have parents that are quiet and reserved.  They go to the practices to watch their child perform and compete, but leave the coaching to the coaches.  There is the occasional parent, however, in swimming that is a large nuisance.  There is one parent who would write “a five- or six-page letter every week for a year and a half.”  Swimming does not have it nearly as bad when it comes to parental pressure.  The article says that because the coaches have specific times to deal with, parents can’t argue and say their child deserves more playing time.  On the other hand, team sports are more subjectively coached, so parents may think that their child deserves more time, even if they aren’t as good.  Above all, I think that coaches shouldn’t take so much abuse from parents.  In fact, parents shouldn’t be allowed to try to coach.  They should leave that to the coaches.

This scandal was when multiple players of the 1919 world series White Sox were accused of throwing the series.  One of the players was Shoeless Joe Jackson.  There were seven other players that were accused of doing so.  There were also betters accused of paying off these baseball players to throw the series.  All eight players that were accused of throwing the series were Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Claude, Williams, Buck Weaver, Arnold “Chick” Gandil, Fred McMullin, Charles “Swede” Risberg, and Oscar “Happy” Felsch.

Shoeless Joe Jackson was a baseball player who played in the Major Leagues in the earlier part of the 20th century.  He had many accomplishments including still holding the franchise record for the white sox of most triples in a season.  These accomplishments are sometimes overpowered by the infamy of being involved in the Black Sox Scandal.

Today I found a lot of research on my topic.  There were a lot of websites and articles that were helpful to my final product.  I found three books on googel books that will be extremely helpful and are very credible sources.  These books will give me a lot of information about Parental Pressure.  There were a couple frustrations when it came to the researching.  A lot of the articles that I pulled up ended up being blogs and parents ranting about their kids and how they need more pressure put on them.  Also, there were many sites that talked about pressure in school work and didn’t relate to soccer.  Overall, the research went very well.

My topic is going to be parental pressure on athletes in sports.

Questions

1. What would drive someone to create this intricate web of lies for themselves?

2. Did he expect that he would end up getting out of this situation?

3. What would happen if the coach found out?

4. Where would he be if he hadn’t made up these lies, and still had the opportunity to go to a better school?

5. Does this compulsive lying say something about his personality, or is there something wrong with him that he can’t help?

After reading this article, I have bittersweet feelings towards it.  I’m not sure whether or not to feel bad for Kevin.  Sure, he lied and put himself into a difficult situation.  This in a way takes away from the sympathy I feel towards him, but on the other hand, I feel as if he could have done much more with his football career if he hadn’t started this lie.  If he had just accepted the fact that he wouldn’t go D-1, and maybe even started accepting D-2 schools, then maybe he could go to a nice school.  He could have more opportunities opened for his life if he had just stayed honest with everyone, but he didn’t.  He lied to everyone.  I don’t know what kind of mindset he was in, but I’m not sure I could ever see myself getting cleanly out of such a big lie.  There was no way out.  What did he expect to happen?  He wasn’t actually going to play football at Cal, and people were going to figure that out.  This is a good lesson for anybody to read.  There is the obvious of staying honest with people, but also this is a big story about ego.  If he had just swallowed his pride, and told everyone from the beginning that he couldn’t go to D-1 schools, then everything would be fine.  Athletes can not allow themselves to have a big head, because eventually, someone is going to burst your bubble.

This article is about the Las Vegas University football coach, and the bitterness that Vegas has towards him.  The Rebels are playing one of the worst teams they could possibly face, New Mexico, but they are yet to win a game.  Vegas is furious with the head coach, Sanford, and say that he can’t possibly stay unless they at least win this one game.  They have embarrassingly lost to many teams over the past month, and fans are about ready to “escort Sanford down The Green Mile.”  Needless to say, they are largely blaming a lot of the lack of success on the coach.  This reminds me of Friday Night Lights, and how the fans will completely turn on the coach following a loss.  Surprisingly enough, this means that Las Vegas puts a lot of pressure on football, and personally I thought all there was to do in Vegas was gamble.  It looks like the coach needs to turn it around for this game, or else that’s the only thing he will be doing in Vegas.

This article is about the Arizona Coyotes, and their overtime win against the Detroit Red Wings.  At the end of the third period, the game was tied at 2-2, so the game went into overtime.  This article begins by talking about the end of the third period when the Coyotes tied up the game to send it into overtime.  Then, with about three minutes remaining in overtime, Adrian Aucoin shot the game-winning goal.  This article was one of the main links on the sports page of an Arizona news website, and came as a big surprise to me.  When i think of Arizona, the last thing i think about is ice, but Arizona likes hockey.  They have a lot of support for their team, the Coyotes.

This article talks about the debate of which team is better tanked; Boise State, or TCU.  There is a lot of bias in this article, and you can clearly see which side the writer is on.  First off, he references Boise State fans, instead of fans from TCU.  He is clearly on their side as he references actions from Boise State games, but not TCU games.  Both teams want to enter the BCS, but BCS does not want to let both teams in, so that is where the debate comes in.  They only want to let in the better team.  This is a very tough decision, however, because the teams are very close in skill level.  Personally, i think they should play against one another, and they can just let the winner in, but the writer of the article suggests that the BCS should just let both teams in.

This article talks about another sport that Alaska is big on.  It talks about how UAA won their 7th straight volleyball match.  That is a very good winning streak.  Although in the beginning of the UAA vs. Western Washington match, UAA got beaten badly in the first set, they rallied back and won the next three sets by large margins.  This article goes into great detail about each set, and gives comments by coaches, players, and fans about the great comeback victory.  Although this may not be the country’s most watched sport, Alaska is very good at it, and proud of it.