Sports Development

Sports fans see Joe Buck everywhere: broadcasting one of the biggest games in the NFL every week, calling the World Series every year, announcing the Super Bowl every three years. They know his father, Jack Buck, is a broadcasting legend and that he was beloved in his adopted hometown of St. Louis. Yet they have no idea who Joe really is. Or how he got here. In Lucky Bastard, Joe takes the listener into the broadcast booth and into his childhood home. Hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking, this is a book that any sports fan will love.

Bob Bowman, best known as the coach for the record-breaking run of Michael Phelps, is one of the most successful coaches in Olympic history. He is lauded for his intense personality, his incredible dedication to his athletes, and his ability to nurture talent in athletes who have the heart and drive to win. This is his motivational book about winning in all walks of life and what you have to do to get there. He presents 10 key concepts that all people should live by.

It’s true that strength declines with age, and your abilities are changing with each passing year. That doesn’t have to mean you give up and let your body rot away. Your muscles can still be exercised and strengthened, and your balance and coordination can improve greatly. You just need to find different exercises that work for you -ones designed specifically for people your age.

In September 2015, Shane Watson, one of cricket's greatest allrounders, was contemplating retirement. At 34, he was still in great physical shape, but his form had deteriorated following a tragedy the year before. Mentally, he was in the darkest hole of his life. A chance meeting with IndyCar champion Will Power changed everything, prompting Shane to work with world-renowned mental performance coach Dr Jacques Dallaire. It was a decision that would reshape his life. Watson discovered the keys to a consistent mental process that gave him access to his skillset once more.

Kirk Herbstreit is a reflection of the sport he loves, a reflection of his football-crazed home state of Ohio, where he was a high school star and Ohio State captain, and a reflection of another Ohio State football captain thirty-two years earlier: his dad Jim, who battled Alzheimer’s disease until his death in 2016.

Why are so many people drawn to running? Why is running the most common physical activity? What is it about running that empowers so many people? And how can runners harness that power to create a more meaningful life? The Inner Runner addresses these questions and a whole lot more. This book is not about how to get faster or run a marathon; rather, it explores how the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other helps you harness your creative powers.

In What It Takes to Be #1, Vince Lombardi, Jr. explores his father's leadership philosophy and extracts powerful lessons about what it takes to be an effective leader. Taking as his jumping-off point his father's legendary 1970 speech on the supreme importance of self-knowledge, character, and integrity, Lombardi, Jr. examines each of those qualities and offers guidelines on cultivating and applying them at work and in your personal life.

Coaches search for it. Parents dream of it. Fans love it. Athletes want it. The Playmaker on any sports team possesses it: an elusive, intangible quality combining anticipation, perception, and decision-making skills. This quality raises their game above the competition and allows them to pass when no one else can, anticipate the movement of opponents, and avoid costly mental mistakes, thus holding the team together. Using today's technology and tools, it is now possible to understand, assess, and train this sixth sense rather than just hope it magically appears.

Ant Middleton is no stranger to fear: as a point man in the Special Forces, he confronted fear on a daily basis, never knowing what lay behind the next corner, or the next closed door. In his groundbreaking new book, Ant Middleton thrillingly retells the story of his death-defying climb of Everest and reveals the concept of the 'Fear Bubble', showing how it can be used in our lives to help us break through our limits. Powerful, unflinching and an inspirational call to action, The Fear Bubble is essential listening for anyone who wants to push themselves further....

What does it take to achieve your personal and professional goals? When is the right time to take calculated risks, and how do you prepare for the moment when opportunity presents itself? If anyone can show you how to do this, it’s Nicole Lynn. As the first Black female agent to represent a top-three NFL draft pick, Nicole worked her way from childhood poverty to become a Wall Street financial analyst, then attorney, and now top agent to elite athletes and entertainers.

Preparation is easy to praise but very hard to master. No modern coach, in any sport, understands that better than NFL veteran Tom Coughlin. He led the New York Giants to two Super Bowl victories with his system of relentless preparation and old-school tough-mindedness. He teaches his players that you can never guarantee a win, but you can always earn the right to win - with focus, consistency, hard work, and anticipation of obstacles. And if you’ve earned the right to win, you can sleep soundly before a big game....

When Pat Cummins unexpectedly became Australia's 47th Test captain at age 28, he inherited a team with a long and storied history, but also one on the cusp of reinvention. It was the beginning of a personal leadership journey for him, a unique moment of challenge and pressure that would see him become a seasoned captain and, in his private life, become a father and husband but also lose his mother to cancer.

In his quest to define ‘sporting greatness’, double Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee has spent nearly four years interviewing and training with some of the greatest minds in sport to discover what it takes to become—and remain—a champion.

Award-winning author and celebrated neurosurgeon Allan J. Hamilton, MD, combines his understanding of the human brain with nearly 30 years' experience training horses to offer wisdom on such universal themes as leadership, motivation, ambition, and humility. The results are showcased in more than 100 thoughtful essays that treat working with horses as a metaphor for personal, professional, and spiritual growth.

In speed skating, a hard pivot is an aggressive shift of direction that requires courage, practice, and split-second timing. For Apolo Ohno, the most frightening hard pivot of his life didn’t happen on the ice—but rather, when he had to hang up his skates for good. “After my final Olympics, I felt confused, vulnerable, and adrift without purpose,” he says.

You can accomplish what you want. You can reach your dreams. Visualize a goal often enough and it will be yours. You have the innate capacity to transform your life. You have the power to achieve amazing results. And this audiobook will help you harness the power that is already within you. This audiobook will help you get what you want in an effortless, pleasant, and relaxing way. All you have to do is to surrender yourself to the potent guided visualization program and enjoy the comforting, soothing music in the background.

In Life as Sport, sport psychologist Dr. Jonathan Fader shares the skills that he teaches professional athletes - to enhance motivation, set productive goals, sharpen routines, manage stress, and clarify thought processes - and applies them to real-world situations. Dr. Fader's audiobook is the product of thousands of hours of conversations with athletes from various teams and sports.

Until five years ago, Alexandra Heminsley was decidedly not a runner. Nor was she athletic in any sense of the word. She was an ordinary, curvy woman who was convinced that sports of any kind, especially running, were beyond her. But she's made running part of her life, and gets to reap the rewards: not just the obvious things, like a touch of weight loss, health and glowing skin, but self-belief, and immeasurable daily pleasure.

The truth is that youth anxiety, stress, burnout, comparison, injuries, perfectionism, and identity disturbance are at all-time highs. Our shortsightedness as leaders is killing the confidence and long-term success of our youth. In the book The Youth Truth, Andrew starts by sharing the shocking and scary realities facing our student-athletes today. He then dives deep into solutions: love-powered leadership and mind-set performance coaching.

The benefits of mindfulness for general well-being have been discussed extensively, but little has been written about how mindfulness can be applied to running. In this book, leading health and fitness journalist Mackenzie L. Havey explores how combining mindfulness with running can not only improve sporting performance but can also enhance overall health.