Sports Athletes

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.

Along the path to any goal - completing a marathon or a thesis paper, winning a medal or a contract - familiar mental hurdles arise: We may fixate on the odds of failure or find our interest flags two-thirds of the way through. That’s when elite endurance athletes - top performers in running, cycling, and swimming - turn to their rich arsenal of cognitive strategies to overcome self-doubt and unlock peak performance.

Despite the howling protests from his peers, no one's ever been more willing to spill the beans on what it's really like inside the pro cycling peloton than the sarcastic scribe Phil Gaimon. Building on the outrageous success of his hilarious 2014 debut, Pro Cycling on $10 a Day: From Fat Kid to Euro Pro, Gaimon gathers the absolute gems from his monthly Q & A feature column in VeloNews magazine into his new book, Ask a Pro.

Avec ses échappées à l'emporte-pièce et son tir puissant, Guy Lafleur a été, dans l'uniforme du Canadien de Montréal, l'un des meilleurs hockeyeurs de son époque. Intuitif, il a toujours foncé vers le filet adverse, crinière au vent, sous les «Guy! Guy! Guy!» enthousiastes de la foule. Son parcours est atypique: il prend une retraite surprenante à 33 ans, et va de nouveau à contrecourant en revenant au jeu, près de quatre ans plus tard. Après un passage à New York, il terminera sa carrière dans l'uniforme des Nordiques de Québec, la ville où sa légende a débuté.

From the author of the award-winning Game Changer comes a new novel about two student-athletes searching for stardom, a young reporter searching for the truth, and a crosstown basketball rivalry that goes too far.

How do you pick Olympic GOATs? Is it gymnast Simone Biles or swimmer Michael Phelps? Or maybe it’s the entire 1992 basketball team. With so many sports, how do you choose? It comes down to stats, history, and hunches.

Mike Krzyzewski, known worldwide as “Coach K,” is a five-time national champion at Duke, the NCAA's all-time leader in victories with nearly 1,200, and the first man to lead Team USA to three Olympic basketball gold medals. Through unprecedented access to Krzyzewski’s best friends, closest advisers, fiercest adversaries, and generations of his players and assistants, three-time New York Times bestselling author Ian O’Connor takes you behind the Blue Devil curtain with a penetrating examination of the great, but flawed leader as he closes out his iconic career.

Ever felt nerves jeopardize your performance? Lost focus in a game, or had a mental block at a critical moment? You're not alone. The secret to overcoming these moments? Mental Strength. Perfect for young athletes, parents, and coaches, this book is your ultimate guide to developing the mental toughness that sets champions apart.

On the playing field, natural talent isn’t enough—there’s a mental component that determines whether athletes win the race or wipe out before the finish line. But what separates standout sports stars from the rest? In a paradigm-shifting new theory, acclaimed sportswriter Matt Fitzgerald identifies two key traits behind athletic success: strict self-regulation over thoughts and emotions and an unquenchable psychological need to pursue victory—even when it means enduring extreme mental and physical suffering.

"Mental Toughness for Young Soccer Players" is more than a book; it's a mentor who guides you through competitive sports' ups and downs. Equip yourself with the tools to handle the psychological demands of soccer and set a foundation for success that will last a lifetime.

From the moment she burst onto the MMA scene, Ronda Rousey was unbeatable. She repeatedly strung together back-to-back flawless victories, racking up a collection of records and forever changing the face of sports as the UFC’s first female champion. A superstar in her sport, she transcended athletics, appearing in blockbuster films and becoming a role model for women everywhere. Then, on November 15, 2015, it all came crashing down. In OUR FIGHT, Rousey explores the greatest challenge of her life and, ultimately, how she rebuilt her life into something better in the aftermath.

The power to become better, greater, more refined versions of ourselves is something that each one of us possesses. It is a power with which we are born, like infinite gold inside the equally infinite mine shafts that are our minds. Now, to get at that gold - there is the rub. Since time immemorial people have struggled to manage the darkness within themselves. How do we reckon our possibilities with our capabilities? How do we overcome the difficulties within? How do we shake off the invisible sandbags that seem to drag us down and run faster, jump higher, push harder?

Few names in the history of baseball evoke the excellence and dynamism that Rickey Henderson’s does. He holds the record for the most stolen bases in a single game, and he’s scored more runs than any player ever. “If you cut Rickey Henderson in half, you’d have two Hall of Famers,” the baseball historian Bill James once said. But perhaps even more than his prowess on the field, Rickey Henderson’s is a story of Oakland, California, the town that gave rise to so many legendary athletes like him.

Noted sports psychology consultant Gary Mack explains how your mind influences your performance on the field or on the court as much as your physical skill does, if not more so. Through 40 accessible lessons and inspirational anecdotes from prominent athletes—many of whom he has worked with—you will learn the same techniques and exercises Mack uses to help elite athletes build mental "muscle". Mind Gym will give you the "head edge" over the competition.

When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift.

On the last night of the 2021 CrossFit Games, ten thousand fans watched in horror as Brooke Wells’ elbow dislocated under the weight of a 190-pound barbell. This is the extraordinary story of what happened next: How Wells pulled off a highly improbable comeback that transformed her mentally and physically into one of the fittest women in the world. In Resilient, Wells provides a refreshingly honest, authentic account of how she overcame fear, self-doubt, and a slew of unexpected obstacles to return to the CrossFit Games less than a year after undergoing total elbow reconstruction.

On April 13, 1986, ten-year-old Tiger Woods watches his idol, Jack Nicklaus, win his record sixth Masters. Just over a decade later, chants of “Ti-ger, Ti-ger!” ring out as the twenty- one-year-old wins his first Green Jacket. He blazes an incredible path, winning fourteen major titles (second only to Nicklaus himself) by the time he’s thirty- three, smashing records and raising standards. Then come multiple public scandals and potentially career-ending injuries.

When “Renaissance runner” (New York Times) Alexi Pappas - Olympic athlete, actress, filmmaker, and writer - was four years old, her mother died by suicide, drastically altering the course of Pappas’s life and setting her on a search for female role models. When her father signed his bereaved daughter up for sports teams as a way to keep her busy, female athletes became the first women Pappas looked up to, and her Olympic dream was born. At the same time, Pappas had big creative dreams, too: She wanted to make movies, write, and act.

Dottir is two-time consecutive CrossFit Games Champion Katrin Davidsdottir's inspiring and poignant memoir. As one of only two women in history to have won the title of “Fittest Woman on Earth” twice, Davidsdottir knows all about the importance of mental and physical strength. She won the title in 2015, backing it up with a second win in 2016, after starting CrossFit in just 2011.

They are motivators, key strategists, tough bosses, and choreographers. They can be branded as heroes, ousted as scapegoats, quietly valued as friends, and everything in between. It's all in the job description for an NHL head coach. In Behind the Bench, Craig Custance sits down for film sessions and candid conversations with some of the game's most notable modern luminaries - names like Mike Babcock, Joel Quenneville, Dan Bylsma, Ken Hitchcock, and Claude Julien - all of whom share their singular views on topics ranging from leadership secrets to on-ice game plans.