In 2010, University of Kansas officials were shocked to learn that the FBI and IRS were on campus investigating Rodney Jones, former head of the Athletics Ticket Office, for stealing Jayhawks basketball tickets and selling them to brokers. Investigators found that for more than five years Jones and a small ring of university officials had conspired to loot the university of $2 million in tickets, reselling them for $3-5 million. In what was perhaps the biggest scandal in college sports history, all seven members of the "Kansas Ticket Gang" plead guilty to RICO Act indictments. Five went to prison-two were given probation for turning state's evidence.

The Chicago Blackhawks, one of the NHL’s “Original Six,� have been building their storied legacy for decades. Since their founding in 1926, the Hawks have won six Stanley Cup championships and produced dozens of standout stars, from Hall of Fame goaltender Mike Karakas in the ’30s to Bobby “The Golden Jet� Hull in the ’60s to current team captain Jonathan Toews. And the Chicago Tribune, the team’s hometown newspaper, has been covering it all from the very beginning. Published to coincide with the start of the 2017–18 season, The Chicago Tribune Book of the Chicago Blackhawks is a decade-by-decade look at the city’s 21st-century sports dynasty. Curated by the Chicago Tribune sports department, this book documents every era in the team’s history, from the 1920s to the present day, through the newspaper’s original reporting, in-depth analysis, comprehensive timelines, and archival photos. Each chapter includes profiles on key coaches and players, highlighting the top players from each decade as well as every Stanley Cup championship. Bonus “overtime� material—stats and facts on championships, Hall of Famers, memorable trades, and more—provides a blow-by-blow look at all 90 years of the franchise’s history.

Commercial aspects of college football and basketball during the mid- to late 20th century were dominated by a few "get rich quick" schools. Though the NCAA was responsible for controlling such facets of college sports, the organization was unwilling and unable to control the excesses of the few who opposed the majority opinion. The result was a period of corruption, rules violations, unnecessary injuries and overspending. These events led to the formation of larger conferences, richer bowl games and rules intended to preserve the "money-making" value of college football and basketball. This book explores gambling, academic fraud, illegal booster activity and the single-minded pursuit of television contracts in college sports, as well as the NCAA's involvement-or lack thereof-in such cases.

When Hubert Davis was named head men's basketball coach at the University of North Carolina in April 2021, history had already been made, as Davis became the program's first Black head coach. But after two difficult seasons, it was hard to imagine how quickly a new staff, a new playing style, and a new roster blending established players with prominent transfers and talented freshmen would be able to change the story-except within the fabled Smith Center locker room and practice gyms, where photos of the New Orleans Superdome helped players and staff focus on the possible. In words and photos full of behind-the-scenes moments, this book reveals how belief in the program's rich traditions and in one another enabled the 2021-2022 Tar Heels to achieve what at times seemed impossible, writing a thrilling new chapter in the story of Carolina basketball. From Davis's remarkable work to build a new staff and roster to the ups and downs of the conference season to the amazing run through March to the pinnacle of the college game, the story takes fans through one of the most dramatic years in program history.

"They don't know me. They don't know what I'm capable of." Diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder, a form of autism, as a toddler, Anthony Ianni wasn't expected to succeed in school or participate in sports, but he had other ideas. As a child, Ianni told anybody who would listen, including head coach Tom Izzo, that he would one day play for the Michigan State Spartans. Centered: Autism, Basketball, and One Athlete's Dreams is the firsthand account of a young man's social, academic, and athletic struggles and his determination to reach his goals. In this remarkable memoir, Ianni reflects on his experiences with both basketball and the autism spectrum. Centered, an inspirational sports story in the vein of Rudy, reveals Ianni to be unflinching in his honesty, generous in his gratitude, and gracious in his compassion. Sports fans will root for the underdog. Parents, teachers, and coaches will gain insight into the experience of an autistic child. And everyone will triumph in the achievements of Centered.

For nearly one hundred years, basketball has been an important part of Japanese American life. Women's basketball holds a special place in the contemporary scene of highly organized and expansive Japanese American leagues in California, in part because these leagues have produced numerous talented female players. Using data from interviews and observations, Nicole Willms explores the interplay of social forces and community dynamics that have shaped this unique context of female athletic empowerment. As Japanese American women have excelled in mainstream basketball, they have emerged as local stars who have passed on the torch by becoming role models and building networks for others.

For nearly one hundred years, basketball has been an important part of Japanese American life. Women's basketball holds a special place in the contemporary scene of highly organized and expansive Japanese American leagues in California, in part because these leagues have produced numerous talented female players. Using data from interviews and observations, Nicole Willms explores the interplay of social forces and community dynamics that have shaped this unique context of female athletic empowerment. As Japanese American women have excelled in mainstream basketball, they have emerged as local stars who have passed on the torch by becoming role models and building networks for others.

Ted Strong Jr. (1917-1978) was a two-sport athlete, a major star of the Negro Leagues and one of the original Harlem Globetrotters. His prominence in the Negro Leagues led Branch Rickey and other white baseball league owners to consider Strong as one of several possible players to integrate major league baseball, and he was a key force on the basketball court when the Globetrotters defeated the then-invincible Minneapolis Lakers in 1948. Despite his athletic dominance in the 1930s and 40s, Strong Jr. has largely been forgotten in American sports history. In Ted Strong Jr.: The Untold Story of an Original Harlem Globetrotter and Negro Leagues All-Star, Sherman L. Jenkins finally shares the fascinating story of this star athlete. Born Theodore Relighn Strong Jr. in South Bend, Indiana, Strong Jr., the eldest of fourteen children, was fortunate to have a positive influence in his father-a baseball player himself. Strong Jr. went on to play in seven Negro League Baseball East-West All-Star games, receiving the most votes in all of Black baseball history in 1939, and was a key member of the 1940 Harlem Globetrotter basketball team that won the World Professional Basketball Championship. Jenkins details all of this and more, including Strong Jr.'s frustrations with integration efforts promised by white baseball team owners and the eventual decline of the Negro Leagues after the entrance of Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball. Through hours of interviews with Strong Jr.'s father and with friends and teammates of his brother Othello, along with extensive research of newspaper archives, this book provides rich insights into an unsung hero in the American sports landscape. For baseball and basketball fans of all ages, Ted Strong Jr.'s biography displays for the first time the determination and guts of a man who was idealized by many African Americans in the early twentieth century.

Team Sports Training: The Complexity Model presents a novel approach to team sports training, examining football (soccer), rugby union, field hockey, basketball, handball and futsal through the paradigm of complexity. Under a traditional prism, these sports have been analysed using a deterministic perspective, where the constituent dimensions of the sportsmen were independently examined and treated in isolation. It was expected that the body worked as a perfect machine and, once all the components were maximised, the sportsmen improved their performance. If the same closed recipe was applied to all of the players who formed part of the squad, the global team performance was expected to be enhanced. As much as these reductionist models seem coherent, when contrasted in practice we see that the reality of team sports is far more different from the closed conditions in which they were idealised. Team sports contain variable, heterogeneous and non-linear constraints which require the development of a different logic to organise their training. During the last few years, ecological psychology, the dynamical systems theory or the constraints-led approach have opened interesting fields of research from which many conceptual foundations can be applied to team sports. Based on this contemporary framework, the current book presents the study of the players and the teams as complex systems, using coordination dynamics to explain the emergence of the self-organisation episodes that characterise them. In addition, this thinking line provides the reader with the ability to apply all of these innovative concepts to their practical training scenarios. Altogether, it is intended to challenge the reader to re-think their training strategy and to develop an original theory and practice of training specific to team sports.

Known to millions as simply "Sister Jean," the Loyola Chicago matriarch and college basketball icon invites you into her remarkable memoir filled with history, wonder, and common-sense wisdom for this century and beyond. As Sister Jean wisely says, "I've seen so many changes in the last 102 years, but the important things remain the same." Part life story, part philosophy text, and part spiritual guide, Sister Jean's wit, wisdom, and common sense has broad appeal and application that transcends religious creed, belief, and even feelings on Loyola's basketball team. Along with her collaborator Seth Davis, an award-winning writer, broadcaster and New York Times best-selling author, Wake Up with Purpose! lets you experience: Sister Jean's words and her spirit. her sharp sense of humor. life lessons gleaned from one hundred years of living. universal themes that connect us all. priceless wisdom. The driving force inside Wake Up with Purpose! is the narrative of Sister Jean's fascinating life--from teaching at a Catholic school during the Second World War to serving on a Chicago college campus in the sixties and beyond to cheering from the sidelines of a men's basketball tournament in March 2018. As you learn about Sister Jean's century-long life, you'll feel just like the Loyola students do when they knock on her office door, plop down in a chair, and ask if she would have time to chat, an activity that she still does daily.

In 1943, at the North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing basketball forever. His team was the highest-scoring team in America, and yet they faced danger whenever they traveled backcountry roads. Across town, the best squad on Duke University's campus wasn't the Blue Devils, but an all-white team from the medical school. They were prepared to take on anyone -- until an audacious invitation arrived. THE SECRET GAME is the story of a long-buried moment in the nation's sporting past. A riveting account of a barrier-shattering game, the evolution of modern basketball - and the coming of a new America.

Big money NCAA basketball had its origins in a many-sided conflict of visions and agendas. On one side stood large schools focused on a commercialized game that privileged wins and profits. Opposing them was a tenuous alliance of liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges, and regional state universities, and the competing interests of the NAIA, each with distinct interests of their own. Kurt Edward Kemper tells the dramatic story of the clashes that shook college basketball at mid-century-and how the repercussions continue to influence college sports to the present day. Taking readers inside the competing factions, he details why historically black colleges and regional schools came to embrace commercialization. As he shows, the NCAA's strategy of co-opting its opponents gave each group just enough just enough to play along-while the victory of the big-time athletics model handed the organization the power to seize control of college sports. An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution.

James Naismith invented the game of basketball as a physical education instructor at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. That December of 1891, his task was to create a game to occupy a rowdy class during the winter months. Almost instantly popular, the game spread across the country and was played in fifteen countries by the end of the century. And yet basketball never had an overriding presence in Naismith's life, as he was also a minister, doctor, educator, and coach. So what did Naismith think about the game of basketball? In The James Naismith Reader, Douglas Stark answers that question using articles, speeches, letters, notes, radio interview transcripts, and other correspondence, including discussions on the game's origins, Naismith's childhood game duck on a rock in Canada, the changing rules, basketball as a representation of Muscular Christianity, and the physical education movement. From Naismith's original rules written in 1891 to an excerpt from the posthumous publication of his book Basketball: Its Origin and Development, Naismith's writings range over a fifty-year period, showing his thoughts on the game's invention and as the game evolved during his lifetime. The first volume to compile the existing primary sources of Naismith's views on basketball, The James Naismith Reader reveals what its inventor thought of the game, as well as his interactions with educators and instructors who assisted the game's growth.

A Memoir of Reinvention

A typical NBA game can yield approximately 2,800 statistical events in thirty-two different categories. In Numbers Don't Lie Yago Colas started with a simple question: How did basketball analytics get from counting one stat, the final score, to counting thousands? He discovered that what we call "basketball"-rules, equipment, fundamental skills, techniques, tactics, strategies-has changed dramatically since its invention and today encompasses many different forms of play, from backyards and rec leagues to the NBA Finals. Numbers Don't Lie explores the power of data to tell stories about ourselves and the world around us. As advanced statistical methods and big-data technologies transform sports, we now have the power to count more things in greater detail than ever before. These numbers tell us about the past, present, and future that shape how basketball is played on the floor, decisions are made in front offices, and the sport is marketed and consumed. But what is the relationship between counting and what counts, between quantification and value? In Numbers Don't Lie Colas offers a three-part history of counting in basketball. First, he recounts how big-data basketball emerged in the past twenty years, examines its current practices, and analyzes how it presents itself to the public. Colas then situates big data within the deeper social, cultural, and conceptual history of counting in basketball and beyond and proposes alternative frameworks of value with which we may take fuller stock of the impact of statistics on the sport. Ultimately, Colas challenges the putative objectivity of both quantification and academic writing by interweaving through this history a series of personal vignettes of life at the intersection of basketball, counting, and what counts.

In Havin' a Ball one of basketball's most colorful characters and storytellers chronicles his life in the game, from high school coach in New Jersey to head coach in both the NBA and the WNBA. Richie Adubato isn't a Hall of Fame name, but he's one of basketball's most beloved coaches, with a lifetime of stories that are humorous and heartfelt, poignant and personal. Adubato's career has crossed paths with many of basketball's most memorable people and events. Starting in the 1960s, he was part of the Jersey Guys, a group of young junior high and high school coaches-including Hubie Brown, Dick Vitale, and Mike Fratello-who all later went on to coach in the NBA. He was hired as Vitale's assistant coach with the Pistons in 1979. Then, three years later, he was hired by Hubie Brown as the Knicks' assistant coach. He would stay in pro basketball for the next twenty-five years, with stints as head coach for the Dallas Mavericks and Orlando Magic and the WNBA's New York Liberty and Washington Mystics. In fact, he is the first coach to have led teams in both leagues to the playoffs. Adubato grew up as an Irish Italian Jersey kid with modest aspirations who went on to experience a fascinating ride in pro basketball. He tells readers how a young Magic team led by Shaquille O'Neal came undone, about his years coaching the Mavericks at a time when the NBA was never more popular, what it was like to coach in the WNBA when the Liberty were outdrawing the Knicks in attendance, and what it was like to coach with, and against, other Hall of Famers. Havin' a Ball takes readers into locker rooms, planes, practices, games, and off court to the inner world of pro basketball with an insider's unique perspective.

J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket. On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket. Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.

Midnight basketball may not have been invented in Chicago, but the City of Big Shoulders home of Michael Jordan and the Bulls is where it first came to national prominence. And it's also where Douglas Hartmann first began to think seriously about the audacious notion that organizing young men to run around in the wee hours of the night all trying to throw a leather ball through a metal hoop could constitute meaningful social policy. Organized in the 1980s and '90s by dozens of American cities, late-night basketball leagues were designed for social intervention, risk reduction, and crime prevention targeted at African American youth and young men. In Midnight Basketball, Hartmann traces the history of the program and the policy transformations of the period, while exploring the racial ideologies, cultural tensions, and institutional realities that shaped the entire field of sports-based social policy. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the book also brings to life the actual, on-the-ground practices of midnight basketball programs and the young men that the programs intended to serve. In the process, Midnight Basketball offers a more grounded and nuanced understanding of the intricate ways sports, race, and risk intersect and interact in urban America.

Journey "inside the numbers" for an exceptional set of statistical tools and rules that can help explain the winning, or losing, ways of a basketball team. "Basketball on Paper" doesn't diagram plays or explain how players get in shape, but instead demonstrates how to interpret player and team performance. Dean Oliver highlights general strategies for teams when they're winning or losing and what aspects should be the focus in either situation. He describes and quantifies the jobs of team leaders and role players, then discusses the interactions between players and how to achieve the best fit. Oliver conceptualizes the meaning of teamwork and how to quantify the value of different types of players working together. He examines historically successful NBA teams and identifies what made them so successful: individual talent, a system of putting players together, or good coaching. Oliver then uses these statistical tools and case studies to evaluate the best players in history, such as Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Charles Barkley and how they contributed to their teams' success. He does the same for some of the NBA's "oddball" players-Manute Bol, Muggsy Bogues, and Dennis Rodman and for the WNBA's top players."Basketball on Paper" is unique in its incorporation of business and analytical concepts within the context of basketball to measure the value of players in a cooperative setting. Whether you're looking for strategies or new ideas to throw out while watching the ballgame at a sports bar, Dean Oliver's"Basketball on Paper" will give you amazing new insights into teamwork, coaching, and success.

Wildcat Wisdom for the Big Blue Nation! For more than a century, the University of Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball team has built a winning tradition that feeds the Big Blue Nation. The history of the winningest program in college basketball is peppered with unforgettable moments and personalities. In Kentucky Passion, Del Duduit and John Huang help fans reexperience some of the most memorable seasons and shots and meet key players and coaches. Readers will learn how they too can rise to challenges and find success through the inspiring stories from Wildcat history. Weekly stories showcasing legendary coaches including Adolph Rupp, Joe B. Hall, Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith, and John Calipari, standout players including John Wall, Kyle Macy, DeAndre Liggins, Goose Givens, and Aaron Harrison, and indelible highs and lows (yes, the BBN still hates Laettner) illustrate the value of persistence, hard work, resiliency, teamwork, and more. Kentucky Passion is for every citizen of the Big Blue Nation and for every sports fan who relishes well-deserved victories, moans at surprise defeats, or wants to learn more about one of the most storied teams in college sports.