The Football Trials: Dangerous Play

The Football Trials: Dangerous Play
Author: John Hickman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1472944135

Bloomsbury High Low books encourage and support reading practice by providing gripping, age-appropriate stories for struggling and reluctant readers, those with dyslexia, or those with English as an additional language. Printed on tinted paper and with a dyslexia friendly font and illustrations, The Football Trials is aimed at readers aged 12+ and has a manageable length (80 pages) and reading age (9+). Produced in association with reading experts at Catch Up, a charity which aims to address underachievement caused by literacy and numeracy difficulties. This exciting coming of age story follows a boy from a tower block as he joins a premier league football academy. This seem to be going well for Jackson - he has signed for United and finally has the chance to go out with Lauren, the girl of his dreams. But when her ex-boyfriend finds out, Jackson is forced to choose between Lauren and his United team-mates. Can he still find a way to make it as a professional footballer? Book band: Brown

The Football Trials: Game Changer

The Football Trials: Game Changer
Author: John Hickman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1472944208

Bloomsbury High Low books encourage and support reading practice by providing gripping, age-appropriate stories for struggling and reluctant readers, those with dyslexia, or those with English as an additional language. Printed on tinted paper and with a dyslexia friendly font and illustrations, The Football Trials is aimed at readers aged 12+ and has a manageable length (80 pages) and reading age (9+). Produced in association with reading experts at Catch Up, a charity which aims to address underachievement caused by literacy and numeracy difficulties. This exciting coming of age story follows a boy from a tower block as he joins a premier league football academy. Jackson is surprised when he gets a call-up to play with United's under-eighteen team, and when everyone starts raving about his playing. But he's in for an even bigger shock when his dad turns up on his doorstep for the first time in years. Can they repair their relationship? Or is his dad out for what he can get? Book band: Brown

The Football Trials: Game Changer

The Football Trials: Game Changer
Author: John Hickman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1472944178

Bloomsbury High Low books encourage and support reading practice by providing gripping, age-appropriate stories for struggling and reluctant readers, those with dyslexia, or those with English as an additional language. Printed on tinted paper and with a dyslexia friendly font and illustrations, The Football Trials is aimed at readers aged 12+ and has a manageable length (80 pages) and reading age (9+). Produced in association with reading experts at Catch Up, a charity which aims to address underachievement caused by literacy and numeracy difficulties. This exciting coming of age story follows a boy from a tower block as he joins a premier league football academy. Jackson is surprised when he gets a call-up to play with United's under-eighteen team, and when everyone starts raving about his playing. But he's in for an even bigger shock when his dad turns up on his doorstep for the first time in years. Can they repair their relationship? Or is his dad out for what he can get? Book band: Brown

The Football Trials: Kick Off

The Football Trials: Kick Off
Author: John Hickman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1472944097

Bloomsbury High Low books encourage and support reading practice by providing gripping, age-appropriate stories for struggling and reluctant readers, those with dyslexia, or those with English as an additional language. Printed on tinted paper and with a dyslexia friendly font and illustrations, The Football Trials is aimed at readers aged 12+ and has a manageable length (80 pages) and reading age (9+). Produced in association with reading experts at Catch Up, a charity which aims to address underachievement caused by literacy and numeracy difficulties. This exciting coming of age story follows a boy from a tower block as he joins a premier league football academy. Jackson is good at football... really good at football. And when a scout from United spots him in the park, it seems like he might just have the chance to make it out of his high-rise tower block and into the premier league. But the other boys have been playing together since they were young and Jackson isn't sure he'll ever fit in – or be able to manage his fiery temper. Book band: Brown

Big Game

Big Game
Author: Mark Leibovich
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0399185437

“A raucous, smash-mouth, first-person takedown of the National Football League." —Wall Street Journal The New York Times bestseller From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town, an equally merciless probing of America's biggest cultural force, pro football, at a moment of peak success and high anxiety Like millions of Americans, Mark Leibovich has spent more of his life tuned into pro football than he'd care to admit. Being a lifelong New England Patriots fan meant growing up on a steady diet of lovable loserdom. That is, until the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick era made the Pats the most ruthlessly efficient and polarizing sports dynasty of the modern NFL, and its fans the most irritating in all of Pigskin America. Leibovich kept his obsession quiet, making a nice career for himself covering that other playground for rich and overgrown children, American politics. Still, every now and then Leibovich would reach out to Tom Brady to gauge his willingness to subject himself to a profile. He figured that the chances of Brady agreeing were a Hail Mary at best, but Brady returned Mark's call in summer 2014 and kept on returning his calls through epic Patriots Super Bowl victory and defeat, and a scandal involving Brady--Deflategate--whose grip on sports media was as profound as its true significance was ridiculous. So began a four-year odyssey that took Mark Leibovich deeper inside the NFL than anyone has gone before. From the owners' meeting to the draft to the sidelines of crucial games, he takes in the show at the elbow of everyone from Brady to big-name owners to the cordially despised NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell. Ultimately, BIG GAME is a chronicle of "peak football"--the high point of the sport's economic success and cultural dominance, but also the time when the dark side began to show. It is an era of explosive revenue growth, but also one of creeping existential fear. Players have long joked that NFL stands for "not for long," but as the true impact of concussions becomes inescapable background noise, it's increasingly difficult to enjoy the simple glory of football without the buzz-kill of its obvious consequences. And that was before Donald Trump. In 2016, Mark's day job caught up with him, and the NFL slammed headlong into America's culture wars. Big Game is a journey through an epic storm. Through it all, Leibovich always keeps one eye on Tom Brady and his beloved Patriots, through to the 2018 Super Bowl. Pro football, this hilarious and enthralling book proves, may not be the sport America needs, but it is most definitely the sport we deserve.

Play Their Hearts Out

Play Their Hearts Out
Author: George Dohrmann
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2012-02-07
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0345508610

“A tour de force of reporting” (The Washington Post) from a Pulitzer–prize winning journalist that examines the often-corrupt machine producing America’s basketball stars “Indispensable.”—The Wall Street Journal “Often heart-breaking, always riveting.”—The New York Times Book Review “Tremendous.”—The Plain Dealer Winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting• Winner of the Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Youth Sports Using eight years of unfettered access and a keen sense of a story’s deepest truths, journalist George Dohrmann reveals a cutthroat world where boys as young as eight or nine are subjected to a dizzying torrent of scrutiny and exploitation. At the book’s heart are the personal stories of two compelling figures: Joe Keller, an ambitious coach with a master plan to find and promote “the next LeBron,” and Demetrius Walker, a fatherless latchkey kid who falls under Keller’s sway and struggles to live up to unrealistic expectations. Complete with a new “where-are-they-now” epilogue by the author, Play Their Hearts Out is a thoroughly compelling narrative exposing the gritty reality that lies beneath so many dreams of fame and glory. One of GQ’S 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century • One of the Best Books of the Year: Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews This edition includes an exclusive conversation between George Dohrmann and bestselling author Seth Davis.

It's How We Play the Game

It's How We Play the Game
Author: Ed Stack
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982116927

Porchlight’s Best Leadership & Strategy Book of The Year An inspiring memoir from the CEO of DICK’s Sporting Goods that is “not only entertaining but will be of great value to any entrepreneur” (Phil Knight, New York Times bestselling author of Shoe Dog). It’s How We Play the Game shows how a trailblazing business was created by giving back to the community and by taking principled, and sometimes controversial, stands—including against the type of weapons that are too often used in mass shootings and other tragedies. Ed Stack’s memoir tells the story of a complicated founder and an ambitious son—one who transformed a business by making it about more than business, conceiving it as a force for good in the communities it serves. In 1948, Ed Stack’s father started Dick’s Bait and Tackle in Binghamton, New York. Ed Stack bought the business from his father in 1984, and grew it into the largest sporting goods retailer in the country, with 800 locations and close to $9 billion in sales. The transformation Ed wrought wasn’t easy: economic headwinds nearly toppled the chain twice. But DICK’s support for embattled youth sports programs earned the stores surprising loyalty, and the company won even more attention when, in the wake of yet another school shooting—at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—it chose to become the first major retailer to pull all semi-automatic weapons from its shelves, raise the age of gun purchase to twenty-one, and, most strikingly, destroy the assault-style-type rifles then in its inventory. With vital lessons for anyone running a business and eye-opening reflections about what a company owes the people it serves, It’s How We Play the Game is “a compelling narrative…In a genre that can frequently be staid, Mr. Stack’s corporate biography is deeply personal…[Features] surprising openness [and] interesting and humorous anecdotes” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Black and Honolulu Blue

Black and Honolulu Blue
Author: Keith Dorney
Publisher: Triumph Books
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2003-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 161749934X

An unfiltered view of life as a big-time college and NFL player, this autobiography follows Keith Dorney, an All-American at Penn State and an All-Pro with the Detroit Lions, as he recounts his journey to the top and his views of football at the highest levels. The book articulately and candidly explores Dorney's life as a passionate football player from the unique perspective of the game's most grueling position. Verbalizing the reality of an athletic career, Dorney shares his hilarious and painful stories--from summer practice fights and game day battles to the training room, operating room, and press room, as well as rowdy nights out on the town and countless mornings wracked with pain the next day.

League of Denial

League of Denial
Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2014-08-26
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0770437567

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.

Baseball Great

Baseball Great
Author: Tim Green
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2009-03-24
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0061923087

From New York Times bestselling author and former NFL player Tim Green comes a baseball book pulsing with action. Baseball Great offers a baseball story attuned to today’s headlines, a totally involving, character-driven, sports-centered thriller. Perfect for fans of Mike Lupica. As a young reviewer on Brightly.com said: “Great book with many exciting, surprising events that make you want to keep reading." When the school paper calls him “Grant Middle’s best hope for its first-ever city-wide championship,” Josh feels like he’s starting to get noticed—in good and bad ways. Seeing Josh’s talent, his father drags him out of the school baseball tryouts and gets him in the running for the Titans, the local youth championship team coached by Rocky Valentine. All Josh really wants to do is play ball, but now Rocky wants him to gulp down protein shakes and other supplements. Suspicious, Josh and his new friend, Jaden, uncover a dangerous secret—and catch the attention of one man who will do anything to keep them from exposing it.