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Kicking the Milk Under the Fridge
We’ve all been there. Stuck in the chaos with no playbook. But what truly makes the difference? It’s how leaders respond after the black swan hits. Think about Penn State, FIFA scandals, US Figure Skating, or even your favorite professional sports league. How they handle the fallout can make or break the organization. The keys…
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Then There Was One: The Shameful Retention & Hiring of Minority Coaches in the NFL
There is little job security for NFL head coaches. It has been said NFL stands for Not For Long, rather than National Football League. But the league which has struggled to promote African American and other minority coaches to head coaching positions, despite having put forward and expanded its Rooney Rule to promote diversity in…
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A Delay of Game is No Reason to Celebrate
On Martin Luther King Day, the Minnesota Vikings interviewed Catherine Raiche for their vacant general manager position. A cheeky sportswriter described it as the current Philadelphia Eagles executive “chatting” with Vikings executives. Other media accounts heralded the historic nature of Raiche’s candidacy. One particularly earnest reporter remembered the groundbreaking path of the first female NFL…
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Who’s Club Is It Anyway?
To say that English people love their football would represent a well-known and generally accepted statement. Over the past two decades, foreign ownership in English Football’s top flight has done nothing but increase. Football is a worldwide game attracting unimaginable amounts of money. For some context, several stars in the English Premier League earn $500,000…per…
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Making Your Mark: PA Best In History, Justin “Jolly” Rogers
Yeah guys and gals, you read the headline accurately, we actually call him “Jolly.” (Jolly Rogers … get it? Credit to Mr. Mark Morris for a hilarious nickname) Jolly is a 17-year-old Senior from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Jolly now is officially the highest high school pole vaulter in the history of Pennsylvania, jumping a remarkable 17’…
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Cleaning the Rivers
Last week, Georgia beat Alabama 33-18 in the College Football Playoff championship game. It was a rematch of a game played a month ago, featuring teams from bordering states in the corner of the country who play in the same conference. Also, it was a showcase of how the game has changed. We root differently…
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All Madden: Life and Coaching Advice from the Life of John Madden
The life of John Madden, who died on December 28, 2021, is a compelling story of a quintessential teacher and coach. It leaves us some clear lessons though to be drawn from his long, good, and unique life. Madden was of course an NFL Hall of Fame coach and a famed broadcaster. That, a pioneering…
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How Do You Deal With Blowups?
When it comes to team sports, it’s common knowledge that athletes have to fight for the team and support their teammates at all times, even if situations may be dire (losing by double digits, losing seasons, being in a personal slump, etc.). However, what do you do when there are blowups during games, some even…
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Happy Birthday Bob: a True Mentor in Ethical Sport Culture
Hey guys and gals, today is quite special to a lot of us, and we at #CultureInSports would be remiss if we didn’t recognize our dear friend and mentor, Robert Aflred Boland … Bob … Professor Boland … he wears many hats my friends. Bob, you have more titles than Apollo Creed. (Watch Rocky, folks,…
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The Not-So-Great Resignation
Something strange and unique happened while I was watching NFL Red Zone last Sunday. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was because it wasn’t clear. Something was going down, and everybody needed to stop and look. Scott Hanson had broken away from the Chiefs-Bengals game to show us at a bare-chested Antonio Brown prancing through…
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When in Rome…
It would be fantastic for professional tennis and for its promotion in Australia if Novak Djokovic plays in the Australian Open this year … but at what point should the very talented among us be permitted to breach or expect exemption from the mandates that the rest of us must follow? Whether you maintain a…
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Sport Anxiety and Mental Health: An Olympian’s Perspective
Let’s face it, Sport Culture doesn’t shine if the athlete doesn’t shine internally. I always have believed that when one has conquered their own mind, then and only then will achieve true athletic brilliance. Unfortunately for me, I was never able to overcome certain aspects of competition anxiety. I did have a healthy and successful…
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It Happened This Week: Curt Flood & Bowie Kuhn and the Battle for Freedom
It happened last week, 52-years ago, Christmas week of 1969, when two of the most consequential letters in the history of North American sports were exchanged. So much of what has followed in the history of sport, in the ongoing struggle for athletes to have a say in their career, their lives, and their labor…
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A Culture of Support
In Australia on Boxing Day, there are two main sporting events that stir the nation’s interest, these are the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, and the Boxing Day Cricket Test. My English friends like to give me a hard time over the cricket, and there is a long-standing friendly rivalry between Australian and the ‘Motherland’.…
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Lessons from a Great Teacher
The week between Christmas and New Years Day is a time of quiet reflection on the past year. It’s a time where the world seems to slow down after the buildup to the holiday and takes a few days off before starting all over again in January. As I reviewed 2021, I was starting to…
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Fragile Athletes and Coaches
I recently wrote an article about When Coaches Are Unwilling to Adapt or Change. In that article I discussed that “Coaching strategies that may have worked at one level may not work at another” and used the recent example of Urban Meyer and the Jacksonville Jaguars. Since then, much has happened in that saga, to…
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Lockouts Defined
I read Greg Steiner’s December 6th contribution to Culture in Sports “Locked Out”, expecting to be critical of it. Instead, I loved it and it very accurately reflects how fans feel about the zero-sum game of collective bargaining and the bargaining process. Why would I be critical of an earnest colleague like Greg? I am…
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Sports, Sponsorships, and Stadiums, Oh My!
At this point, large companies becoming the title sponsors of large sporting arenas and stadiums have become commonplace in today’s sporting world. In the highly commercialized and capitalistic economy of the United States, the American consumer has become accustomed to seeing companies names and logos in a stadium built for sports. It’s a marketing gig,…
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Sport Motherhood: An Athletic, Personal, and Professional Lifestyle
A common perception and statistic is that only 1% of high school athletes become collegiate athletes, well, maybe that’s true. However, they achieve such success because of a support system – usually their Mother. If my audience wants to look at Sport’s Culture, think about the nurturing care of a “Mom” while a child is…
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TKR and the Road to the Perfect Season
The Trinbago Knight Riders (TKR) in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) ended up having a perfect season in 2020, winning all 10 of their regular-season games as well as two playoff games, including the final. It was just a sensational performance in a season held behind closed doors due to the effects of COVID-19, which…
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Sporting Ethics in the New Paradigm
In the latest Culture in Sports podcast, Mike and Wes discuss all things sporting ethics with Bioethics expert and author Art Caplan. Having suffered from Polio as a young person, Art became interested in the field of medical science and physiotherapy before his sporting experiences had developed. As a young adult, Art played semi-pro football…
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Taking on NFL Ownership
As the NFL season winds down, its league-wide social responsibility initiative “Inspire Change” will be on display in stadiums around the country. Yet it’s easy to imagine a familiar scene on Super Bowl Sunday, a day described former commissioner Paul Tagliabue as “Winter’s Fourth of July.” As confetti swirls around SoFi Stadium, a (most likely…
