How to Rig the NCAA Basketball Championship for Fun and Profit is a humorous, poignant and alarming novel about a guy who plans to fix the biggest college game of them all to draw attention to the games mounting problems, for revenge and to make a whole lot of money. Over the many years Stanley Osborn reffed, college basketball had grown into a huge business, enriching universities, coaches, equipment and apparel manufactures, donors and the NCAA; everybody associated with the game except the players. The brutal treatment of refs by rabid fans, overpaid coaches, the media and the many conference and NCAA officials increased along with the game's popularity. And it was becoming harder each season to convince his wife and daughter that his avocation was worth his time away from home. But most troubling for Stanley was reconciling the sleazier aspects of big-time college sports with its purpose of providing fair, equitable and sportsmanlike competition as part of the higher educational experience of the student-athlete. Finally, after being suspended for tossing perhaps the best coach in the basketball out of a key game, Stan had had enough. He developed a plan to get even with all who had questioned his officiating talent and honesty and to focus much needed attention on the exploitation by and corruption of the sport he once loved. Stan made the life-altering decision to apply his officiating skills to influence the outcome of games without attracting attention. The successful execution of the plan would make him rich. And hopefully promote some much needed reform of college athletics. How to Rig the NCAA Basketball Championship for Fun and Profit is a no-holds barred examination of the good, bad and ugly about college basketball. Frankly, it's downright scary.

In 1972, the University of Arizona built McKale Center, a basketball arena that seated nearly 14,000 people. Filling that arena would present considerable challenges: the Wildcats hadn't been to an NCAA post-season tournament for over two decades, and attendance at Bear Down Gymnasium, which holds 3,000, was dismal. Enter Fred Snowden. Tasked with developing a basketball program that would justify the existence of the arena, the newly appointed head coach exceeded all expectations. He assembled a staff of high-quality assistant coaches, recruited dynamic, talented players who made the games exciting to watch, and -- perhaps most importantly -- got the Tucson community to support those players. He accomplished all of this while receiving hate mail and death threats from people who didn't approve of the Wildcats being led to victory by the first black coach in NCAA division one for a major school in a major conference. Tucson a Basketball Town shines a light on an often overlooked chapter in UA history. Fans of the game will be sure to root for Coach Snowden as he transforms Tucson into the basketball town we know and love.

Think you know everything about the Boston Celtics? Think again The follow-up to the original Boston Celtics IQ, this test will strain your brain even harder. Volume II contains five chapters and 200 brand new trivia questions that will stump even the most seasoned Celtics fans. No Celtics topics are off-limits. Are you a Celtics Hall of Famer, or should you start rooting for a lesser franchise like the Lakers or Knicks? It's time to find out - test your skills, wrack your brain, it's the ultimate Boston Celtics IQ test.

Coaches spend lots of time preparing to teach offense and defense before the start of practice each season. Most teams are reasonably well prepared to execute their basic offensive and defensive systems. Many of these same teams struggle when it comes to the game of basketball's "offensive" special situations Utter the words "half court trap defense" and many point guards simply panic. Go to a coaching clinic and ask how many coaches would like to learn about beating a full court press and watch the hands go up. These are issues even veteran coaches struggle with at times. Coaching Basketball's Offensive Special Situations covers a wide range of topics coaches need to deal with in order for their teams to successfully compete with the best teams on their schedule. Being well prepared for special situations is often the difference between a mediocre season and a great season. Some of the topics covered include: -- Planning for special situations -- Essential fundamentals and the drills to teach them -- Delay game offenses -- Principles for beating half court traps -- Half court trap offenses -- Principles for beating full court pressure defense -- Press breaker offenses -- Timeouts -- Quick hitters and set plays The information in this book is designed to help coaches successfully plan for most special situations that occur in typical games. This book will be a valuable reference tool for new and veteran coaches alike.

Within the pages of this book, you will find a detailed approach to teaching a Match Up Zone Defense that has twice the state of Texas in scoring defense. Using man-to-man principles within the concept of a zone defense, Coach Biddison takes you through a step by step process of not only how to run the defense, but how to teach it. In a sense, the Flex Match-Up Zone takes the very best of the man-to-man techniques and combines them with the best zone principles to form a defense that often times confuses the offense. This defense rotates, or flexes, to take on a different shape every time the ball moves or players positions change. The fact that sometimes it appears as a 1-2-2, other times as a 1-3-1, and still other times as a man-to-man defense, literally takes the offense out of their comfort zone.

Basketball was originally designed to be a team game, but today's players are growing up in a culture that focuses on the individual. In Teamwork, Mike Huff calls coaches and athletes to return to basketball's essence, by focusing on The 7 Essentials of Teamwork: communication, leadership, humility, roles, team spirit, a winning attitude, and collective responsibility. The lessons in this book will enable coaches to teach life lessons that help players become winners on and off the court. "Mike Huff addresses a serious issue in the basketball culture changing from an emphasis on the team to an increased focus on the individual. He calls coaches to lead the way in returning the focus where it belongs, which is on the team first. Teamwork: Rediscovering the Essence of Basketball will help any coach who is interested in teaching the game of basketball and important life lessons through basketball." -Mike Kryzyzewski, Head Coach, Duke University Basketball "Building a great team and a championship level culture are two of the biggest challenges a coach faces every season. Using his extensive experience and knowledge as a player and coach, Mike Huff provides valuable insight into the nuances of these important concepts. Every coach should have this book in his or her library." -Greg Dale, Director of Sport Psychology and Leadership Programs for Duke University Athletics

There is something about teams who play intense, effective and hard nosed man-to-man defense that sets those teams a notch above other good teams. These great defensive teams exude a confidence that other teams often find intimidating. What sets these great defensive teams apart from average man-to-man defensive teams is usually not the overall defensive system. It is a combination of small details, intensity and an emphasis on the team concept. Fine Tuning Your Man-to-Man Defense contains 101 concepts capable of improving any man-to-man defense plus 60 drills designed to teach defensive skills and concepts. The concepts and drills, as well as additional bonus content, are illustrated with over 150 diagrams.

Coaching Youth Basketball is challenging in many ways for the adults who undertake the task. While many club and youth league coaches have a good understanding of how to play the game of basketball, these same coaches often struggle to find ways to teach the skills, tactics and strategies need to have success in the sport of basketball. 201 Drills for Youth Basketball provides the solution to this challenge. Included in this 400+ page manual are drills for: --Man-to-Man Defense --Competitive Rebounding --Lay-ups --Free Throws --Shooting Drills --Fast Break Drills --Drills for Essential Fundamentals Illustrated with extensive diagrams, each drill is described in as concise a manner as possible. Use the drills as described in the book, adapt the drills to your own specific team and the requirements of the players or use the drills as a basis to design your own drills. Eight time Coach of the Year award winner Kevin Sivils has shared many of his favorite drills that helped his varsity teams win nearly 500 games in 22 seasons. Also included in the book are brief suggestions for planning practice, selecting drills and guidelines for planning to develop shooters.

Whether you run the famed Loyola Marymount fast break made famous by Paul Westhead, the Grinnell "system," the "Tiger Ball" break of Olivet Nazarene or just leave your fast break to chance, the concepts in Fine Tuning Your Fast Break: 75 Concepts To Improve Your Team's Fast Break Offense will improve your team's running game The book is organized so each concept can be found easily. The concepts are grouped by areas of specificity such as concepts specifically for point guards, the entire team, etc. Detailed diagrams are included for concepts that benefit from a visual depiction to help clarify the concept. Just some of the topics covered include concepts on how to train your point guard to be more efficient, resulting in reduced turnovers, ways to convert turnovers into points, making certain every fast break opportunity is as efficient as possible and 7 Bonus Concepts on how to slow down the opponent's fast break attack. Coach Kevin Sivils shares his years of experience coaching the fast break and developing up tempo offensive attacks utilizing the concepts and principles described in this book. Winner of 8 Coach of the Year awards, as well as awards for excellence in teaching and Teacher of the Year, Coach Sivils has nearly 30 years of experience as a highly successful varsity basketball coach, college assistant and varsity assistant coach.

Tips, Techniques, and Best Practices for Scholastic / Collegiate Basketball Officials. Topics include: Personal & Partner Pregame Pointers, Sanctity of the Locker Room, Referee in Small Bites, Striving for Excellence, Freedom of Movement and Setting the Tone, Why Do Officials Miss Plays?, Going by the Book, Game Awareness, Above the Ring Rulings, Leading From the Lead, On The Trail and in the Center, SDF: Start -- Develop - Finish, Shot Blocking --What To Look For Fouls on Rebounds, R S B Q -- Rhythm, Speed, Balance, Quickness, Match Ups WIF -- Windup, Impact and Follow Through, Hand Checks, Body Language & Signals, Variation of Whistles, Preparing for the Final Moments, What's Your Officiating Personality?, Personalities and Officiating Experience.

Basketball Analytics is a must-read for any sports analytics enthusiast or student of the game of basketball. Authors Stephen Shea, Ph.D. (Professor of Mathematics) and Christopher Baker (Software Engineer) utilize their unique skill-set to introduce original metrics for analyzing player performance, team style and team construction in the NBA. While demonstrating an awareness of the industry's best ideas, the authors present original, objective and efficient strategies for understanding how teams win. New player performance statistics include Offensive Efficiency (OE), Efficient Offensive Production (EOP), Defensive Stops Gained (DSG), and Approximate Value (AV). OE reflects a player's ability to make the most fundamental offensive decisions. EOP adjusts a player's points and assists based on his efficiency. DSG gives a complete measure of a player's defensive contributions, without relying on individual player statistics like blocks and steals. AV is a measure of total player performance that rivals any publicly available statistic. Basketball Analytics introduces groundbreaking metrics on player involvement in the offense. Point, Rebound and Assist Balance aggregate player usage in these critical statistics. New studies on the NBA show whether teams should strive for balance or unbalance. An NBA draft pick value study determines the average value of each pick and the likelihood of landing a star or role player with each draft position. The results of this study are used to discuss topics including the biggest draft blunders and steals, the draft success of each NBA team, and the quality of each draft class dating back to 1977. This valuable understanding of the NBA Draft creates a foundation for discussing various approaches to team development and construction. Additionally, the authors discuss redefining the positions on the court, unpredictability in the game, data visualization, and applications of spatial tracking technology. There are many intensely debated questions surrounding the NBA today. Who are the most valuable players, and how do they compare to past greats? Which players have the greatest impact on their team's defense? Should Kobe Bryant be concerned with getting his teammates involved in the offense? How do offenses differ in the clutch, and which players thrive in these situations? How difficult is it for a team to rebuild through the draft? Basketball Analytics introduces new statistics and new concepts to explore these questions and more.

The Phoenix Suns: The View From Section 101 is a past and present history of the fast breaking NBA team. From the first NBA finals in 1976 through the 1987 drug scandal the Suns developed a fast paced and character defined style. Steve Nash and Grant Hill are examples of that greatness with the run and gun system. The player roster is young and talented. The future is unknown and for the fans it is an exciting time.

Imagine a boy, five feet tall and one hundred pounds, who wants to play high school basketball. Now imagine that he was blind until the age of six and that he's the first black student to attend his suburban school. And there you have Michael Thompson in 1965 in San Bruno, California. He played at the school where a young English teacher was coaching "lightweight basketball," a competition for smaller players that has since disappeared. The team that Coach John Christgau put together came to be called the Whiz Kids for the way they rocketed up and down the court, led by Michael and invariably winning.

"Michael and the Whiz Kids" tells the story of the team's 1968 championship season. It is a tale of cliffhanger games and players as outsized in character as they are short in stature, from the wild-haired, bespectacled "Professor" to the well-traveled Latvian dubbed "Suitcase" to the quiet and tenacious "Salt," as in "of the earth." But it is also a tale of the time--of counterculture, suburbia, integration, and racial brawls erupting on the court. In Christgau's deft telling, it is an absorbing, often comic story of coming of age, for coach and Whiz Kids alike.

Growing up on the hardscrabble streets of LA in the late 1950s, Billy McGill stood out. At eleven he was dunking. At fifteen he was playing in pickup games against Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain--and holding his own, in part because he invented the jump hook shot, which no one could defend. How he went from college phenom, well on his way to becoming the greatest player Los Angeles ever produced, to sleeping in abandoned houses and washing up in a Laundromat sink is the story Billy "the Hill" McGill recounts here.

The first African American to play basketball for the University of Utah and the highest scoring big man in NCAA history, McGill was the first pick of the 1962 NBA draft. But the injury that would undo him--a knee injury in his junior year of high school--had already occurred, and it would worsen year after year until his career faded away. From college star (whose scoring record is still unbroken) to troubled player, bouncing around the NBA and the ABA, McGill takes us from the heights to his precipitous fall--and the slow recovery of a life he had never prepared for. A cautionary tale, written with a candor and authenticity rarely seen in pro athletes, his book is also the incredible story of one of the greatest unknown basketball players of all time.

Coaches always want to improve their teams. Usually they go about this by searching for the perfect offense or defense. Few coaches stop to realize one of the best ways to improve their team is to improve their players. Fine Tuning Your Team's Position Play provides position specific concepts to improve player's skills. Included are concepts for point guards, perimeter players (shooting guards and small forwards) and post players (power forwards and centers). Illustrated with 120+ photographs and 120+ diagrams in an 8.5 x 11 inch sized format, Fine Tuning Your Team's Post Play also includes drills to teach the concepts described. The author, a long time coach, includes ideas on the importance of using mastery of fundamentals to build confidence, ideas for planning practice sessions and additional bonus material. Fine Tuning Your Team's Position Play is an excellent reference manual for veteran or young coaches as well as players who want to learn some of the finer points of the game. Some examples of concepts included are: --Two different tactics to inbounds the ball to point guards when pressed. --How to best enter the ball into the post - coordinating the perimeter and post players. --Passing from the low post. --Setting and using screens. --Techniques that will reduce turnovers. Also included in Fine Tuning Your Team's Position Play are 34 Drills and Drill Progressions designed to improve player's skills. Some of the drills described include: --Basic Movement Drills --The Shooting Progression --Feed the Post Skill Progression --Daily One Minute Drills --Drills designed to master lay-ups in game-like conditions. Fine Tuning Your Team's Position Play is part of a five book series, each of which is full of concepts and ideas about how to improve a specific part of your basketball team's game. Other titles in this series include: Fine Tuning Your Fast Break, Fine Tuning Your Zone Attack Offense, Fine Tuning Your Man-to-Man Defense and Fine Tuning Your Three-Point Attack.

Featuring over 200 articles and 125 illustrations, "The Lost Century of Women's Basketball" is a time capsule of media reports from the birth of women's basketball in the 19th century.

High school, college, and athletic club teams played in leagues and competed in tournaments long before the modern era of women's sports. After a wild first decade, this brief flourishing of women's basketball was tamped down by social pressure and the wide-open full-court game was tamed by a partitioned court and restrictive rules that remained intact until the passage of Title IX in 1972.

This volume includes coverage of Eastern women's college teams at Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, Cornell and Bryn Mawr, the first intercollegiate basketball game between the Universities of Stanford and California, the outbreak of Hoosier hysteria in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and reports from across the country about this popular new sport for women.

Women began to play basketball within a few weeks after YMCA instructor James Naismith unveiled the game on March 11, 1892. The sport quickly spread to YWCAs, athletic clubs, high schools, and colleges across the country.

Basketball released women's competitive passions more than any other sport. For players in the heat of a contest, scrambling on the floor and tussling over a loose ball were natural athletic reactions. But to many 19th century observers it was a shocking display unlike anything they had ever seen before, a disturbing eruption of unbridled physicality that society had tamped down for centuries.

The clash between ladylike decorum and athletic abandon troubled many educators, social commentators and sports authorities. Young women were expected to remain proper and demure in all public settings. While golf, tennis, bowling, ice skating, and other individual sports inspired acceptably feminine behavior, the action-packed team game of basketball, often played before a boisterous all-female audience, permitted a Victorian girls' night out, and by many accounts the girls went wild.

Scandalous reports of name-calling, hair-pulling, cheating, arguing with referees, and fighting on the court were sensationalized in the press. Gymnasium balconies surged with loyal supporters clad in team colors, yelling organized cheers and exchanging volleys of taunts with rival fans. Critics of women's sports were not the only ones who were alarmed. The same women who pioneered the game sought to rein it in soon after it was unleashed.

This volume includes excerpts from Senda Berenson's influential booklet for Spalding's Athletic Library, the basketball chapter from the first comprehensive book written about American women's sports, and rare insight into the women who pioneered the game: Lucille Eaton Hill of Wellesley, Kate Anderson in Chicago, Helen Freeman in Iowa, Clara Baer in New Orleans, Lucile Hewett in Utah, and Margaret Livingston Stanton Lawrence, daughter of the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in New York.

This volume includes teams or reports from: Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Wyoming, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Hawaii,

The Lost Century of Sports Collection (www.LostCentury.com) publishes illustrated anthologies from America's sporting heritage. Other books in the series include The Lost Century of American Football, The American Football Trilogy, Football Linemen, and Daughters of the Lost Century.

The Basketball Team Play Design Book gives you blank templates for creating your own plays. Whether you are a professional, in a basketball league, or just a basketball enthusiast, you will love spending time creating your own plays.

Shooting the ball successfully is the most important skill in the sport of basketball. The latest in the Coaching Basketball Series, 101 Shooting Drills for the Game of Basketball provides coaches who are searching for drills to improve their players shooting ability will find this book invaluable. Illustrated with both diagrams and photographs, 101 Shooting Drills for the Game of Basketball contains drills to cover nearly every instructional situation a coach will face. Some of the chapters included are: - Warming up the Shot - Lay-ups - Free Throws - Developmental Shooting Drills - Competitive Shooting Drills - Fast Break Drills - Shooting Drills for Fun - Post Play Shooting Drills Each drill is described in detail, provides information on organization, estimated time to be allotted, and the concepts the drill teaches. There is something for every basketball coach in 101 Shooting Drills for Basketball, veteran and rookie coach alike.

In "The Golden Age of Basketball - Volume I" Sports Photojournalist Steven A. Roseboro presents a words-eye view of the most exciting Decade in the History of the NBA, the Eighties. The Book chronicles the remarkable rivalry between Earvin "Magic" Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers and Larry Bird's Boston Celtics, who won a combined 8 of 10 NBA Championships in the Decade. The competitive excellence of Bird vs. Magic changed the landscape of the league and laid the foundation for the global explosion of Professional Basketball. Volumes I (1979-1984) and II (1985-1989) feature over 500 action photos as Bird, Magic, the Ageless Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the Spectacular Julius "Dr. J" Erving, and Isiah Thomas' Bad Boy Detroit Pistons all battled for League supremacy. Volume I also profiles Hall of Famers Moses Malone, Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, James Worthy and George Gervin, who left their indelible imprints on the Decade. Relive Magic Johnson's "Magical" 42 point, 15 rebound, 7 assist masterpiece in Game 6 of the 1980 NBA Finals, Larry Bird leading the 1981 Celtics back to their customary perch atop the NBA, the go-go World Champion Lakers of 1982, Moses Malone's "Fo-Fo-Fo" Philadelphia 76ers bringing Julius Erving his first NBA title, and the emotionally charged 1984 NBA Final, a seven game classic first meeting between Bird's Celtics and Magic's Lakers. Boston's hard-earned title sets the stage for Volume II, introducing the NBA and the world to the player taken second in the 1984 NBA Draft, the man that would take the game from the floor to above the rim, Michael Jordan.