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Playing to Win

By: Michael Lewis
Narrated by: Michael Lewis
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Publisher's summary

When New York Times best-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis got involved in his kids’ local softball league, it all seemed so wholesome and simple. Ten years later, his family looked back to find that they had spent thousands of dollars - not to mention hours - and traveled thousands of miles in the service of a single sport.

All over America, families are investing blood, sweat, tears, and retirement savings in their children’s sports careers, all with the ultimate goal of…what exactly? A college scholarship? A professional contract? Simply the taste of victory?

Through the lens of the highly competitive world of girls’ softball, Lewis reveals the youth sports industrial complex that has arisen to aggressively monetize after-school pastimes. The major players aren’t the ones on the field - they’re the ones stripping the pockets of unwitting parents to the tune of billions of dollars a year, creating an arms race of amateur athletics and enabling the Varsity Blues scandal. So what’s in it for the parents - or, for that matter, the kids themselves? This from-the-bleachers portrait of our national obsession with youth sports explores the consequences of high-stakes play for families, communities, and the kids in the game.

©2019 Michael Lewis (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.
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About the Creator and Performer

A best-selling and critically acclaimed author, Michael Lewis is also the narrator of his Audible Originals for Audible Studios. Lewis is renowned for disrupting industries and exposing systemic injustices by probing the lives of individual people in his previous works. Want the lowdown on the financial system? Understand the industry through the moves of one shark finessing it in Lewis’s nonfiction classic The Big Short. Yearn to learn how baseball really works? Feast your ears on Moneyball, and listen to the men who uncovered the hidden numbers game within the game. Tough issues of race and class become relatable in The Blind Side as Lewis tells the true story of a black high school student living with an evangelical family. In The Coming Storm, the first one of four Audible originals to come from Lewis, he focuses his unique brand of nuanced reportage on the implications of state-of-the-art weather data.

Interview: Michael Lewis’s ‘Playing to Win’ Is a Game-Changing Look at Youth Sports

'...the machine is aimed at prizes, and the prizes are places in colleges and college scholarships...'
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  • Playing to Win
  • '...the machine is aimed at prizes, and the prizes are places in colleges and college scholarships...'