Parenting Sports

In this "amusing, insightful, and nuanced memoir about building a new relationship in middle age, a tandem bike is both character and metaphor". The bike offers the new couple an ongoing physical challenge and an arena that requires cooperation and negotiation to assemble a new marriage on the detritus of multiple divorces, breakups, and a death.

Stealing Home is the story of an 11-day, nine-game trip with a Little Leaguer - and how plans for perfection delivered things deeper than scores, miles, and smiles. You don't have to drive 3,147 miles to find your way to fatherhood. When Ron did, something magical and rare appeared at the end, inside his heart as well as on a diamond.

To runners around the world, Dr. George Sheehan, author of the landmark New York Times best seller Running and Being, was nothing short of a guru - the country’s “greatest philosopher of sport”. But to his son Andrew, who had spent his entire boyhood longing for the attention and approval of an emotionally distant father, he was an incomprehensible paradox: a lifelong loner, who was now sunning himself in the spotlight of the nation’s press; a hero to millions, who seemed to have no time for his own son.

For most of his life, Josh Wilker has been on the sidelines. Spending his days in a cubicle in the far reaches of Chicago, and his nights in front of Red Sox games, he has been content to let others take center stage. From childhood onward, he sought comfort from anxiety and depression in the archival pages of sports almanacs and stat sheets: a place where forgotten players lingered and time seemed to stop - a welcome relief from worldly problems.

In 2015 former England football star Rio Ferdinand suddenly and tragically lost his wife and soul mate, Rebecca, age 34, to cancer. It was a profound shock, and Rio found himself struggling to cope not just with the pain of his grief but also with his new role as both mum and dad to their three young children. Rio's BBC1 documentary Being Mum and Dad touched everyone who watched it and won huge praise for the honesty and bravery he showed in talking about his emotions and experiences.

Performance facilitator and elite mindset coach Gareth Timmins was one of only 0.1% of Royal Marines Commando applicants to reach the end of the intensive and gruelling training, and to earn the coveted Green Beret, a world-renowned symbol of excellence. By drawing on his life experiences after reaching this elite status, his subsequent research into psychological theory and observations shared with him from many elite athletes, Timmins aims to break the commonly held assumption that people who achieve consistent successes, do so with ease.

In Home Ice, with equal parts humour and anguish, Angie Abdou charts a full season of life as an Atom-level hockey mom, from summer hockey camp to the end-of-season tournament. Her revealing stories and careful research on issues such as cost, gender bias, concussion, and family pressures offer a compellingly honest and complex insider’s view of parenting today’s young athlete in a competitive and high-pressure culture.

Hilary Topper was a 48-year-old working mother who, once upon a time, had practically failed high school gym class. She was working 60-plus hours a week, running a small business. In the meantime, her weight kept increasing, and she was unhappy with her life. To turn things around, she joined a gym for the first time. This book will take the listener on Hilary’s journey as she trains for and runs her first 5K, swims the waters of the Caribbean, cycles in Milwaukee, learns how to run-walk through the New York City Marathon, and competes in her first triathlon in Sanibel, Florida.

What's the secret of a great comeback? And how do we boost our mental fitness to succeed in sport and life? The Comeback Quotient provides inspiration and practical advice on building mental endurance and physical stamina. When bestselling sportswriter Matt Fitzgerald went through a coronavirus-George Floyd double whammy, he realized that nobody can escape setbacks in life so we all need to be able to pull off a comeback. In training for his first triathlon since 2009 and overcoming chronic injury, Matt Fitzgerald puts his ultrarealist mental fitness training to the test.

In any high-pressure environment, from special operations to the operating theatre, you can divide people into two groups—those whose performance is controlled from the outside in and those who control their performance from the inside out. Inside Out is about your ability to achieve incredible things on the outside by paying attention to what's on the inside.

Job loss. Foreclosure. Relationship woes. Health issues. Dire financial straits. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that nobody goes through life unscathed -- no matter how rich, how smart, how talented, or how fortunate they may be. White collar, blue collar, or no collar, there is an undeniable commonality to the raw emotion that strikes people when they are knocked down.

Joe Sealey was watching his son play for Manchester United's Under-14s when a man came up to him and said: "I've got your dad's book". Joe's father, Les, had been Manchester United's goalkeeper but had died of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 43. His death tormented Joe, who had been West Ham's reserve keeper. Joe had given up on football, slipping into an alcohol and drug addiction that almost killed him. He had forgotten what his father's voice sounded like. Now, here it was in form of a Tupperware box full of cassette tapes.

The author has spent his life studying the Japanese martial art of Aikido. When looking for teachers, he asks questions about the meaning of sacrifice, the physical and mental limits that can be exceeded. This is a book about passion and the cost of following your dreams.

Do you know how to make good decisions in stressful times? Have you ever felt discouraged from dealing with a difficult situation? Do you want to know how the most successful men and women dominate their fears and overcome every challenge of their lives? In this audiobook, you'll learn the strategies for building mental toughness as well as how these strategies apply to nearly any situation where emotional strength and mental grit are tested.

Football teams create playbooks, in which they draw up the plays they will use on the field. Playbooks are how teams work and why they win. This book is about a different kind of playbook: The one coaches, teams, universities, police, communities, the media, and fans seem to follow whenever a college football player is accused of sexual assault. It’s a deep dive into how different institutions - the NCAA, athletic departments, universities, the media - run the same plays over and over again when these stories break.

As the sports reporter for BBC Radio 1 for the best part of a decade, Simon Mundie was pitch-side at many of the most high-profile sporting events in history. It was often thrilling, but when he took to the airwaves to report on what he had seen, it increasingly felt like something was missing. The emphasis always seemed to be on results, tactics and the score. But as the saying goes, sport is a metaphor for life – so Simon set out to explore that.

This book tells the story of success and reveals the lessons learned by one of NBA’s greatest basketball players. LeBron James is a professional basketball player and is widely considered one of the best players of all time. With numerous endorsement contracts with huge global brands and experience with the best basketball teams, it seems LeBron James found success easily. Yet the basketball player experienced several setbacks and challenges as he rose to the top, and his success is the product of years of hard work and pushing himself to reach his incredibly high standards.

Mike Brearley is one of the most successful cricket captains of all time, and in 1981 he captained the England team to the momentous Ashes series victory against Australia. In The Art of Captaincy, his treatise on leadership and motivation, he draws directly on his experience of man-managing a team, which included a pugnacious Ian Botham and Geoffrey Boycott, to explain what it takes to be a leader on and off the field.

Helen Mort has always been drawn to the thrill and risk of climbing: the tension between human and rockface, and the climber's powerful connection to the elemental world. But when she becomes a mother for the first time, she finds herself re-examining her relationship with both the natural world and herself, as well as the way the world views women who aren't afraid to take risks.

One of rugby’s most ferocious flankers and successful players, James Haskell has always strived to be at the very top of his game. To achieve a global rugby career, he knew he had to keep his body strong. To go on to found an award-winning production company, become a successful DJ and bestselling author, he knew he had to keep his mind even stronger. Revolutionary and revealing, Approach With(out) Caution is James Haskell as you’ve never known him.