“The Fulham coaches distilled the threat, defined the tactics and dictated the tempo at which they expected their team to play. It was a tough European tournament, featuring Paris Saint-Germain, Monaco, Inter Milan, Bayern Munich, Anderlecht and Feyenoord, but it was deemed to be winnable.” So begins Chapter 2 of the great book No Hunger…
Here at Changing the Game Project, every week we get a call or email that says “remember that article you wrote about…? We want to use it in our newsletter and we can’t find it. What was it called?” Well, after four years of publishing thousands of words a month, we have realized that we…
The scouts snickered. They looked at the time again. To this day the 5.28 second 40 yard dash time is one of the slowest for quarterbacks in the history of the NFL combine. His 24.5 inch vertical leap didn’t have them lining up at his door either. He had been a good, but not an…
“What do you think is going to change in the next ten years?” That is a question that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gets all the time. He thinks that is an interesting question, but not the best one people could ask. “I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next…
Every year, I travel throughout the US, Canada, Asia and Europe, and give well over 100 presentations to parents and coaches. I speak to tens of thousands of people about youth sports, coaching, and athlete development. Every time I do a live event, I get asked the following question: “If you are presenting all this…
When you run an organization such as the Changing the Game Project, you hear many youth sports stories from parents, coaches, and players. Some stories are absolutely heartbreaking, others inspiring. Recently I encountered the absurd. Many of us have seen the news about a volleyball player from Washington DC who was taking her playing time…
On a recent sunny Saturday, I took my kids out to the local park to play soccer with some friends. They ran, they jumped, and they competed hard. They laughed, they schemed, and they made the rules. Everyone played, no one was excluded from the game, and all the kids tried and failed over and…
For the last few days, my email and social media accounts have been lit up by a simple image first shared with me on Twitter by @ohiovarsity. It is amazing because the image portrays something that is widely known among experts, widely discussed in coaching circles, and has certainly been written about by me and…
A myth is a false belief or idea that is widely held. One such myth that has enveloped youth sports is the idea that to become an elite athlete all one needs 10,000 hours of sustained, deliberate training. This is a myth in every sense of the word. I recently gave a talk at a…
My article on sport specialization, “Is it Wise to Specialize,” prompted quite a bit of discussion, commentary, and controversy, with people chiming in from all across the globe. Certainly the dynamics of single v multiple sport participation, and its effect upon performance, injury, and burnout, is not a settled issue, and arouses many emotions. It…