Sports Science

Former collegiate star, sports agent, and NFL executive Michael Huyghue recounts his journey in professional sports and the challenges that remain for minorities to succeed as front office executives in the multibillion-dollar sports industry. The author's journey as an athlete and lawyer provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors in the world of professional sports and collegiate athletic programs. It is also a chronicle not often told of growing up Black and male in white suburban America.

In Beep, David Wanczyk illuminates the sport of blind baseball to show us a remarkable version of America’s pastime. With balls tricked out to squeal three times per second, and with bases that buzz, this game of baseball for the blind is both innovative and intense. And when the best beep baseball team in America, the Austin Blackhawks, takes on its international rival, Taiwan Homerun, no one’s thinking about disability. What we find are athletes playing their hearts out for a championship.

An inside look at the 2017 Houston Astros championship season, focusing on the epic seven-game World Series, the front office decisions that built a winning team, and the resilience of the city in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. On November 1, 2017, the Houston Astros defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in an epic seven game battle to become 2017 World Series champs. For the Astros, the combination of a magnificently played series, a 101-victory season, and the devastation Hurricane Harvey brought to their city was so incredible it might give Hollywood screenwriters pause.

'Every animal needs its own territory, and humans are no exception. My plans were clear at an early age. I intended to live somewhere wild and supremely beautiful.... I imagined searching the whole world for a place, high and remote as a sheep stell, quiet as a monastery, challenging and virginal, untouched and unknown.' Over 20 years ago, well before the current trend for nature writing, Janet White wrote The Sheep Stell, a beautiful and evocative memoir about her life as a shepherdess.

Intangiball tracks the progress of the Cincinnati Reds through five years of culture change, beginning with the trades of decorated veterans Adam Dunn and Ken Griffey, Jr. It also draws liberally from such character-conscious clubs as the Atlanta Braves, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, New York Yankees, and Tampa Bay Rays.

On the heels of the cult television hit Friday Night Lights, The New York Times best-selling author of The Junction Boys pens the story of Texas high school football integration, and the three men who put together a championship team.

In 2008, Lynn Barber's passion for birding led her to drive, fly, sail, walk, stalk, and sit in search of birds in 25 states and three provinces. Traveling more than 175,000 miles, she set a 21st century record at the time, second to only one other person in history. Over 272 days, Barber observed 723 species of birds in North America north of Mexico.

Joan Bomford, BBC Countryfile's Farming Hero of 2015, has lived all her life in the lush, rolling countryside of the Vale of Evesham, where cows graze the water meadows of the River Avon and modern life seems far away. Farming is in Joan's blood. Generations of her family have worked the land, and in Up with the Lark, Joan tells us with warmth, wit and great insight what it's been like to live through an era of such enormous change.

Pro basketball player Rasheed Wallace often exclaimed the pragmatic truth "Ball don't lie!" during a game. It is a protest against a referee's bad calls. But the slogan, which originated in pickup games, brings the reality of a racialized urban playground into mainstream American popular culture.

Although its participants are still in grade school, Pop Warner football is serious business in Miami, where local teams routinely advance to the national championships. Games draw thousands of fans; recruiters vie for nascent talent; drug dealers and rap stars bankroll teams; and the stakes are so high that games sometimes end in gunshots. In America's poorest neighborhood, troubled parents dream of NFL stardom for children who long only for a week in Disney World at the Pop Warner Super Bowl.

At first glance, Josh Hanagarne seems an improbable librarian. He stands 6'7", competes in strongman contests, and was diagnosed in high school with Tourette's syndrome. But books are his first love - Josh's earliest memories involve fantastic adventures between the pages of Gulliver’s Travels and a passionate infatuation with Fern from Charlotte’s Web. Everything in Josh’s life - from his Mormon upbringing, to finally finding love, to learning to control his tics through lifting - circles back to a close connection with books.

The New York Yankees. The Boston Red Sox. For a hundred years, no two teams have locked horns as fiercely or as frequently, and no two seasons frame the colossal battle more perfectly than 2003 and 2004. Now, with incredible energy and access, leading sports columnist Mike Vaccaro chronicles the history of the greatest rivalry in sports, and the two stunning American League Championship Series that define a century of baseball.

What happens when a 37-year-old office worker, who exercises marginally less than the average cheese sandwich, decides to walk 630 miles of challenging coastline in one go? Will he go on an epic voyage of self-discovery...or just get really knackered? Find out the answers to these important questions, and many more, by joining him on a grand adventure that takes in 26,719 steps, 921 stiles, 302 bridges, 91,000 feet of climbing and descending, one seal, zero basking sharks, lots of chips and one overweight, oversize backpack.

Perhaps the best golfer ever, Tiger Woods rocketed to the top of a once whites-only sport. Endorsements made him a global brand and the world’s richest athlete. The child of a multiracial marriage, Woods and his blond, blue-eyed wife, Elin Nordegren, seemed to represent a new postracial America. Then, in late 2009, Woods became embroiled in a sex scandal that made headlines worldwide.

Five generations of Marnie O. Mamminga's family have been rejuvenated by times together in Wisconsin's Northwoods. In a series of evocative remembrances, Mamminga takes us to Wake Robin, the cabin her grandparents built in 1929 on Big Spider Lake near Hayward, on land adjacent to Moody's Camp. Along the way, she preserves the spirit and cultural heritage of a vanishing era, conveying the heart of a place and the community that once gathered there.

FEAT DESC

Seven centuries into the future, aliens and humans compete for the greatest prize in the universe: the Galaxy Bowl trophy. Quarterback Quentin Barnes enters his third season at the helm of the Ionath Krakens. He's reshaped the team in his image, and the time for excuses is over; it's win, or be replaced. Quentin's championship quest carries him and his teammates across the galaxy in a brutal 12-game season fraught with injury and death. But he faces more than just on-field challenges.

This study, based on newspapers, journals, oral interviews, and academic studies examines 19th- and 20th-century cultural changes through the space and place of American baseball parks to expose how public buildings exemplify American culture. The argument put forth by author Connie F. Sexauer is: Connections can be made by examining these places to reveal economic, political, and social conditions of American society to reveal changes to the culture of the day.

Documenting multiple challenges at every turn - as a target for racism from society at large and sexism both inside and outside of the Negro League - this is the unique story of the first woman to play professional baseball on a men's team, breaking barriers in sports while believing, "There's got to be a first in everything. Maybe it will be me." The text explains that as players began to leave the Negro League for major league teams, Toni Stone seized her only opportunity to play professional ball and replaced Henry Aaron on the Negro League's top team.

Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African American high school football in Texas. Drawing on interviews, newspaper stories, and memorabilia, Michael Hurd introduces the players, coaches, schools, and towns where African Americans built powerhouse football programs under the PVIL leadership. He covers 50 years (1920-1970) of high school football history.