Youth-Athlete's Sport Blog

On the exciting day that ESPN kick-off their 2008 college basketball coverage, the legendary basketball coach Pete Newell passed away at the age of 93.  Pete is a basketball coaching legend being the first of three coaches to coach the winning teams of a NCAA championship (1959), NIT championship (1949), and Olympic Gold Medal (1960) (the other two are Bobby Knight and Dean Smith).  More...

On any given day, any team or anyone can win the game.  This is what makes competitive sports so much fun.  You never know when a player or team outmatched in every aspect of the game pulls off the victory by stunning their opponent.  Take a lesson from Michael Jordan. More...

In my previous post, Basketball Strategies 101, I provided a simple metric to measure the effectiveness of a team's offensive and defensive strategies.  In this post, I want to describe Dean Smith's more sophisticated offense and defense measure that he called possession evaluation.  This metric is described in detail with several examples in his book, Multiple Offense and Defense.  This book is a must read for any basketball coach or player who wants to understand and teach the fundamentals of basketball.  More...

Basketball often times is considered a simple game with the winning team having a higher score after competing for a pre-defined amount of time.  But what is often missed are the underlying offensive and defensive strategies and, most importantly, how to judge their effectiveness.  More...

This is the fourth and final post on the SPARQ rating and training system.  The previous post answer the questions: what is SPARQ training, why an athlete should care about the rating system , and what it tests?  In this post, I will insights into the commitment required for the training to be successful and a few results of athletes that have gone through the program. More...

SPARQ (an acronym for Speed, Power, Agility, Reaction and Quickness) tests an athlete's overall athleticism.   The follow up training is to help athletes improve in all of those areas through dynamic training. More...

In modern day sports, we keep track of every stat, no matter how small.  But until the SPARQ training and rating system was created in 2004, there was never a way to measure a main component in a competitive athlete's success ... their pure athletic ability.  The goal of the SPARQ system is to boil down a player's athleticism into one number that represents the player’s overall athletic skill—pinpointing what areas he or she is good at, and which areas they need to improve. More...

Nike is making a push in the athletic training equipment business with the 2008 winter launch of their SPARQ training equipment line.  The initial product launch featured San Diego Charger running back Ladainian Tomlinson hosting a press conference about "his better."  If you watched any sporting event during the March to June 2008 timeframe, you will recognize the commercial.  But all this hype begs the questions: what is SPARQ training, why should you care, and what does it test?  Let's dig in and see if we can find some answers.  More...

On March 31, 2008, ESPN was running Kobe Bryant's jump over an Aston Martin.  Is it real or fake?  Not to be outdone, on April 24, 2008, Kenny Smith (a TNT Sports commentator) had to duplicate the stunt.  Did Kenny make it?  Watch an see.

WARNING:  Do not perform this stunt at home! More...

For the past two weeks the NCAA men's and women's basketball teams have been competing in their conference playoffs.  If you love basketball like I do then you have probably watched a few games.  This season seems to have a lot of parity between the top ranked teams in the conferences and many games are being decided by a couple points.  With so many close games, I am finding myself talking to my kids and players about the importance of each possession and how a misplay in an early quarter is just as devastating as one in the fourth quarter.  I keep bringing up a poem written by Jeff Smith while he was a Coach at Dayton that highlights the value of each possession.  More...