Popular Sports

Behind every Summer Olympic scoring soccer kick, tennis-ball bounce, and hard-hitting volleyball serve, science is at work. The type of kick used on a soccer ball affects its path. An equestrian leans forward during a jump to help the horse balance. Cyclists wear tight clothing to reduce drag. Find out how science is involved in several popular Summer Olympic events and how athletes take science into account in their quest for the gold medal.

In Sport Matters: Leadership, Power, and the Quest for Respect in Sports, Shropshire examines the need for diversity, inclusion, respect, and equality in sports, focusing on the need for leadership to embrace and deliver these principles in a real and tangible way within the sports industry. He also introduces the sports power matrix, a framework for understanding power within the sports industry.

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier.

In Pinstripe Nation, Will Bishop explores the myriad of ways in which the Yankees and their successes (or spectacular failures) became interwoven with the nation's larger cultural narrative. As this informative and entertaining audiobook amply shows, the Yankees have, through all their ups and downs, retained a hold on the American imagination unmatched by any other sports franchise.

In From Sandlots to the Super Bowl, Craig R. Coenen recounts the NFL's ascension from a cash-strapped laughingstock to a perennial autumn obsession for millions of sports fans. It offers an in-depth summary of the NFL's early years and its struggles to build an identity. This book approaches the history of the National Football League not only with stats and scores but with what happened beyond the gridiron.