Today, more than 68 million children and adolescents participate in sport programs in the United States. Yet despite the growth and popularity of highly-organized athletic competition, controversy still swirls around the role that adults, particularly coaches, play in the world of youth sports. Coaches not only occupy a critical leadership position in the athletic setting, but their influence can extend into other areas of life as well. Sport Psychology for Youth Coaches is a practical "how-to" guide that helps coaches use their leadership role to achieve optimal benefits for young athletes, both on and off the field/court. It is designed to help coaches create rewarding experiences for young athletes and provides specific behavioral guidelines that have proven to have positive, and lasting, effects. The authors address a wide range of everyday concerns including motivation, stress reduction, psychological skills, relations with parents, legal responsibilities, and other areas of importance to both coaches and athletes. Using clear examples and real stories, they help coaches hone their own skills so they can bring out the best in their young competitors - in sports and in life. No coach should be without this essential guide, whose principles have been successfully applied and tested on thousands of coaches around the world.

Mental health within elite sport has traditionally been ignored, but recent research has shown that competitive sport can at times seriously undermine mental health and that athletes are exposed to specific stressors that hinder their mental health optimisation. Mental Health and Well-being Interventions in Sport provides an indispensable guide for researchers and practitioners wanting to understand and implement sport-based intervention processes. This important book adopts an evidenced based approach, discussing the context of the intervention, its design and implementation, and its evaluation and legacy. With cases on depression, eating disorders, and athletic burnout, the book is designed to provide practitioners, policy makers and researchers with a cutting-edge overview of the key issues involved in this burgeoning area, while also including cases on how sport itself has been used as a method to improve mental health. Written for newcomers and established practitioners alike, the text is an essential read for researchers and practitioners in better understanding the sport setting-based intervention processes through presenting current research, theory and practice, applicable in a variety of sports settings and contexts.

In this book John Connolly and Paddy Dolan illustrate and explain developments in Gaelic games, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), and Irish society over the course of the last 150 years. The main themes in the book include: advances in the threshold of repugnance towards violence in the playing of Gaelic games, changes in the structure of spectator violence, diminishing displays of superiority towards the competing sports of soccer and rugby, the tension between decentralising and centralising processes, the movement in the balance between amateurism and professionalism, changes in the power balance between 'elite' players and administrators, and the difficulties in developing a new hybrid sport. The authors also explain how these developments were connected to various social processes including changes in the structure of Irish society and in the social habitus of people in Ireland.