Product Description
This book of interviews with track and field athletes highlights those whose lives have revealed courage, persistence and decency both on and off the field. After their great careers ended, they went on to become authors, teachers, coaches, radio and television sports commentators, consultants, Congressmen, actors, businessmen, military officers, social workers and ministers. Many continued in athletics long after their days as Olympians.

The Olympic track and field athletes include Glenn Cunningham (middle distances), Lee Calhoun (high hurdles), Ken Doherty (decathlon), Dick Fosbury (high jump), Bruce Jenner (decathlon), Abel Kiviat (middle distances), Bob Mathias (decathlon), Al Oerter (discus throw), Bob Richards (pole vault), Wes Santee (middle distances), Jackson Scholz (sprints), Bill Toomey (decathlon), Forrest Towns (high hurdles), Craig Virgin (long distances), Archie Williams (long sprints), John Woodruff (middle distances), and Olympic coaches Payton Jordan and Berny Wagner. They talk about the influences in their lives that helped them develop their values, their first memories of competition and participation in their sport, their educational experiences, the problems they faced when they were active competitors and the problems athletes today face, and many other topics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A MUST READ BOOK!
I was fortunate enough to attend a recent college graduation where the author, Dr. Don Holst, gave the commencement address. His wonderful and impassioned speech led me to purchase his book that he so eloquently referred to. He used the triumphs and successes of the Olympic athletes as a backdrop to his theme that diligence and hard work are the keys to the graduating students' futures.
What a wonderful surprise! Holst recounts his discussions with the great athletes in this great book! He tells their stories in their own words while painting a brilliant picture of the worlds they lived in and how the ultimately came to affect it!
A must read for all! Great stories from both young and old to enjoy!

Universal Appeal
Don Holst, a consummate athlete, coach and professor in his own right has given us an important work on Olympic American Men of Track and Field.He has presented their Herculean accomplishments, taken us into their homes and made these icons our hosts as we sit at their feet listening and marveling and learning.Dr. Holst and Marcia Popp have offered a specialized work which has universal appeal.

I Thought I DIDN'T Like Sports, But Apparently Now I Do !
Don Holst has managed to accomplish the IMPOSSIBLE --- he has made me LOVE SPORTS !Read this book, I DARE YOU, and then TRY TO PUT IT DOWN...Glenn Cunningham's story will inspire you, Jackson Scholz will delight and tickle you, and Bruce Jenner will continue to amaze you, even as Craig Virgin's breaks your heart ... it's all about the times, and the timing.

Every MOM needs to read this, to help you understand why those boys and girls want to work SO HARD, when many of their peers choose the drugs and booze...It's HEART, my friend, something in the soul they are born with that whispers to them to do something MORE, and in the cases of these athletes, MUCH, MUCH MORE...

I have an extensive, eclectic home library, but I can't remember the last time I actually dog-earred and mutilated a book by LOVING IT SO MUCH..., or carried it from room to room, not wanting to miss a moment. (OR re-read it as soon as I finished, just to enjoy it all over again).

Hard to put down, and harder to forget Holst's unforgettable interviews with these true American Heroes, from the start of this project in the 50's to the present, this little book has the big heart of a sports history classic. NO superlatives in Webster's will suffice for this fine expenditure of your all-too-busy time. Buy 2, and send 1 to your favorite NON-athlete !

KMorris in Saint Louis,
Home of the big stainless steel handle next to the water ... Read more

Product Description
This comprehensive, practical resource provides practical tools for building effective programs and winning teams. Written by a coach with over 30 years' experience, the Guide provides tested techniques and strategies with scores of drawings and photos. Over 100 reproducible letters, forms, diagrams, and training schedules are also included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Very helpful book.
Very helpful book... gives a great overview of the basics, as well as some more specific stuff.Could use some updating, but on the whole a great resource.

Excellent
This is an excellent book for new and experienced coaches alike.The technical knowledge is great and very understandable.

Indispensible Reference for New Coaches
There are wonderful gems of wisdom in this coaching manual. I adapted the information in it to start up a grammar school track and field program and we were highly successful in our first season! Coach Wallace gives you the benefits of his 30+ years coaching and it greatly reduced the learning curve for me. This is especially useful for coaches starting up programs on a "shoestring" budget with less-than-optimal facilities. I would highly recommend it to any track and field coach.

Disappointing
Although this book has some helpful information, overall I do not feel that it is ideal for a typical high school track program (in Iowa).There is only information on 300m hurdles, not run in Iowa;we run the 400m hurdles in high school.Also the majority of high schools here do not begin track until February or March, and the training schedule in the book is for a much longer season and seems to be geared more for the college level.

Ok, But!
I found this book to be a valuable resource. I don't like that coach Wallace offers for you to email him for additional info - and when you do, he doesn't reply. Take the offer out of the book then. ... Read more

Product Description
This edition of the annual contains comprehensive review of the 1999 World Championships in Seville, articles on aspects of the sport, biographies of 700 leading athletes country-by-country and with performance results, and the results of the 2000 World Cross-Country Championships. ... Read more

Product Description
Includes descriptions of the habits, habitats, tracks, signs, and ranges of all the mamals of North America.More than 1,000 illustrations show individual tracks, different track patterns, animals in their habitats, droppings, and gnawed trees - every type of clue the tracker needs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Best Field Guide
If you own only one animal track field guide - own this one.

Excellent field guide
This is what a field guide should be, clear, concise, and easy to use. My wife who is just starting to tune in to nature loves it. She was up to speed in 10 minutes and loving it from then on.

A must-have tracking classic
When I was a kid running a trapline in northern Michigan, this was the book I carried in my rucksack.Today, more than 35 years later, I've written 2 books of my own on the subject of tracking wildlife, but this book is still on my bookshelf.Olas Murie was a true American pioneer who led the way into an area where no one else had gone before him.He established the first standards, and while modern genetic and other scientific techniques have increased our knowledge of wildlife manifold over what was known in Murie's day, it was he who laid the foundation on which the rest of us build. This book is a must-have for every tracker's library.

Good and comprehensive guide, a little difficult
It is a good and comprehensive guide, it has a lot of animal tracks, I found it a good and complete guide, but honestly sometimes I had a lot of difficult tryng to find some kind of tracks that I found.

In my personal opinion I think that this is a very good book for experts on the field but not so good for beginners in animal tracks. And by the way it doesnt have any color illustration, and altough they are not needed I was very familiar with peterson guides and this one is a little different.

A very useful guide
My wife and I have found this guide to be very useful in interpreting the sign left behind by the creatures resident in our northeastern woods, not only tracks but scat as well (with hundreds of detailed drawings of scat it is as much a guide to those leavings as tracks).The extensive behavioral descriptions are equally useful.I am not clear on the basis for the criticisms contained in the other review concerning animal harassment.Dr. Murie was a dedicated conservationist and President of The Wilderness Society after his retirement from the Fish and Wildlife Service and his respect for the creatures he is describing is evident on every page. While he acknowledges that some tracks were obtained from live-trapped animals, it is clear from the book that the overwhelming mass of the data is from direct field observation from a life spent in the outdoors. ... Read more

Product Description
This guide is unique in its approach to identification. It allows you to first look at the track or sign and then, by means of keys, to determine the animal group or species responsible for what you see. The keys refer you to detailed descriptions and illustrations. The guide is arranged to enable quick identification. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

happy reader
I am traveling to South Africa as part of a volunteer program and was extremely happy when I received my books in excellent condition and way ahead of the delivery date. ... Read more

Product Description
By birth a Nigerian prince, Kriss Akabusi (and his brother) lost touch with his parents in the Nigerian civil war and was brought up in England in a local authority children's home. At 16 Kriss joined the army, where he did well; this was the start of his athletics career. At 20 he visited Nigeria for the first time, to an ecstatic welcome from his people. In 1984 he was picked for the Olympic Games to run in the 400 metres (he got to the final) and the 4 x 400 metre relay (silver medal). He has raised the profile of black athletes by his courage and his consistent, disciplined approach to sport. Drugs were a temptation, especially when younger athletes began to outshine him, but he resisted and instead switched to hurdles. His training companion is gold medalist Roger Black. Following the 1986 Commonwealth Games, Kriss began to ask himself what life was all about. He read the Bible presented to all the athletes at Edinburgh and was strongly attracted to the person of Jesus. He found "history, his story, reality" in what he read. Nine months later, in a training camp in the USA, he challenged Jesus to speak directly to him. Kriss wrote the vivid dream that followed.Next morning he told his fellow athletes, "I met Jesus last night" - they though he was crazy. His German wife Monika doesn't share his faith - although she admits Kriss is easier to live with, more thoughtful and sensitive these days. Their first daughter was the first test-tube baby to be delivered in Berlin. They now have two girls. Kriss has now left the Army and is studying Christianity in a college in California, where he also trains each winter. He belongs to a large and flourishing Californian church, and to a smaller church near his home in Southampton. In the European Championships of 1990 he took the gold and broke the record. In 1993, at the World Championships in Tokyo, he won a bronze medal in the 400 metre hurdles, and brought home the gold in the final of the 4 x 400 metres relay, in a spectacular finish. He was awarded an MBE in summer 1991 and voted sports personality of the year. He appears constantly on TV. This re-issue includes a revised introduction and re-written final two chapters, as well as new photographs. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Trailcraft: Not just for the Naturalist
This extensive text on animal tracking is and excellent resource on different track identification and animal behavior, from birds to reptiles. What I found particularly of interest to me was the chapters on fossil tracks, reproducing tracks and Indian tracking. Definitely a good book for the tracker weather you are an expert or beginner. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Useful book
What I like best about this book is that it is simple enough for my 3 year old to put into use. He loves hiking and even going in our backyard and trying to match the pictures in the book with the tracks in the snow and mud. Very useful, filled with great information for myself. ... Read more

Product Description
This book contains hundreds of illustrations and is organized in an acesible format for easy identification of the visible traces left by Australian mammals in their passage. Triggs provides all the information needed to identify mammals anywhere in Australia, using only the tracks or other signs these animals leave behind.This is an indispensable guide for bushwalkers, naturalists, students, zoologists, and other professionals -- in fact, it will appeal to anyone who ever wanted a better understanding of Australia's unique mammal fauna. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fantastic Book with Hard to Find Info
This is a fantastic book. All very useful information, hard to find all in one place. I don't know of any similar work for the general reader.

Nothing compares to being able to know that an animal you rarely or never see actually lives in an area and has passed by recently. The descriptions of footprints and the drawings were clear enough that I was able to determine an exact species from macropod (from a good set of prints) on the basis on the footprint alone. This also matched up with the expected distribution for this species (also shown in the book, next to its scat picture). I haven't come across any random bones in the bush yet to be able to identify from the descriptions given in the book, but the section on bones is as clear and concise as the rest of the book.

The coverage of other sorts of signs (scraping, scratch marks, etc) is also quite handy and clear.

There are some improvements I would like to see in any future editions. I would like to see a scale marker in *every* single scat picture. This would be preferable to taking all the photos at the same scale (which they mostly seem to be) because at that scale the droppings of the bats become very hard to distinguish. The *ideal* I think would be to have all the pictures at 'life size' from a particular distance, with a zoomed-in picture with a scale marker.

*All* the pictures should be in colour (except the skeletal pictures). Each scat should have a description, and a picture of an unbroken and a broken pellet. Some are like this, but not all. The description for the scat could describe the changes in the scat throughout the year as the diet of the animal changes. This could at least be done for all the common and well-known animals.

The other problem with the scat pictures is that they are of varying ages. The colour changes greatly with age (very fresh = very green, aging to various shades of brown). Some of the pictures are of semi-fresh scats, and the others are quite old.

However, these issues do not detract from the usefulness or quality of this edition - I just hope to see some extra features in any future editions!

It is a massive task to collect all this information and pictures, and even though this book is the only one of its kind that I know of for general readers, I am sure that if there were other books on the same topic, this would still stand out as a high quality and invaluable resource for australian naturalists!

Useful field guide.
This is an extremely useful field guide for lovers of wildlife in Australia.Many animals are nocturnal and leave only small clues to their presence.With this guide I have been able to sleuth out a number of previously unobserved species.The descriptions of tracks, scats and traces are clear and thorough and there are many useful photographs, illustrations and distribution maps. ... Read more

Product Description
Athletics 2008is the yearbook of the Association of Track & Field Statisticians and has been published every year since 1951 a year after the organisation was founded.?Once again this book is essential reading for all enthusiasts of track and field. Peter Matthews is a television commentator for the IAAF, and has covered all major athletics events since 1985 with ITV or the IAAF. For ten years before that he was a broadcaster on athletics for BBC Radio. A long-time ATFS member, he was formerly Editor of the Guinness Book of Records and International Editor of Athletics Today magazine. He is co-publisher of Athletics International. ... Read more

Product Description
Abel Kiviat (1892-1991) was one of track and field's legendary personalities, a world record-holder and Olympic medalist in the metric mile. A teenage prodigy, he defeated Hall of Fame runners before his twentieth birthday. Alan S. Katchen brings Kiviat's fascinating story to life and re-creates a lost world, when track and field was at the height of its popularity and occupying a central place in America's sporting world.

The oldest of seven children of Moishe and Zelda Kiviat, Jewish immigrants from Poland, Abel competed as "the Hebrew runner" for New York's famed Irish-American Athletic Club and was elected its captain. Katchen's engaging biography centers Abel Kiviat's life and his sport firmly in the context of American social history. As a quintessential New Yorker, Kiviat embodies the urban and ethnic roots of American track. From his first schoolboy competitions on city playgrounds, to his world records at Madison Square Garden, to his pioneering role as track's press steward in the age of emerging media, Kiviat's life reveals how his sport was shaped by the culture of the emerging metropolis. New York City is not only the setting for these developments but also a subject of the book. The narration is enriched with brief portraits of celebrated track athletes including Kiviat's Olympic roommate, Jim Thorpe. In addition, Katchen offers a detailed account of the I-AAC's evolution, including its close ties to the Tammany Hall political machine, and sheds light on the rapid modernization of the sport and the ways it provided a vehicle for the assimilation of working-class, immigrant athletes. Finally, Katchen explores the social origins of the ideology of amateurism and its devastating impact on Kiviat's career.

Kiviat died at ninety-nine, just months short of carrying the torch for the opening ceremonies of the Barcelona Olympics. Abel Kiviat, National Champion pays tribute to a remarkable athlete and the sport during its most dynamic and celebrated era. ... Read more

Product Description

You are a talented student athlete. Your sport is track where you excel in the middle distance events. An athletic scholarship to college would change your world, but you're surrounded by powerful people and confusing decisions. Not everyone has your best intentions at heart. What should you do? As a young runner who has already gained celebrity status, you are surrounded by athletes of all ages who have taken different paths on their way to the top. What will you decide on the way to the race of your life? ... Read more

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Product Description

The completely updated edition of the definitive sports field book

Recognizing that new developments in the design, construction, and maintenance of sports fields have literally changed the playing field, Sports Fields, Second Edition is now fully updated and revised to continue its legacy as a leading authority on sports field management. Highly illustrated, with step-by-step examination of essential topics such as turfgrass and soil science, sand fields, turf paints, field quality evaluation, and weather preparedness, this in-depth guide chalks out the ultimate game plan to integrate these elements into a winning project. Sports Fields, Second Edition includes:

• New coverage of environmental stewardship and resource conservation, natural and organic field maintenance, and artificial turf care and maintenance

• Discussion of the following field types: baseball, softball, football, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, tennis, and track and field

• Updated information on grasses, pesticides, fertilizers, and equipment

• New exploration of green initiatives in the design and maintenance of fields

• Hundreds of illustrations, 50 percent of which are newly updated

A versatile how-to guide, Sports Fields, Second Edition suggests solutions to common field problems that are not only helpful for professional sports turf practitioners, but also for park and recreation professionals, school athletic field managers, architects, landscape architects, and engineers. Chapter after chapter delivers on the promise of imparting well-grounded principles that can be applied to create athletic fields that are long-lasting, visually dazzling—and eminently playable. ... Read more