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Now more than ever, American dads act as hands-on caregivers who are devoted to keeping themselves and their families healthy. Yet, men are also disproportionately likely to neglect their own health care, diets, and exercise routines—bad habits that they risk passing on to their children. 

In Dads, Kids, and Fitness, William Marsiglio challenges dads to become more health-conscious in how they live and raise their children. His conclusions are drawn not only from his revealing interviews with a diverse sample of dads and pediatric healthcare professionals, but also from his own unique personal experiences—as a teenage father who, thirty-one years later, became a later-life dad to a second son. Marsiglio’s research highlights the value of treating dads as central players in what he calls the social health matrix, which can serve both healthy children and those with special needs. He also outlines how schools, healthcare facilities, religious groups, and other organizations can help dads make a positive imprint on their families’ health, fitness, and well-being.  

Anchored in compelling life stories of joy, tragedy, and resilience, Dads, Kids, and Fitness extends and deepens public conversation about health at a pivotal historical moment. Its progressive message breathes new life into discussions about fathering, manhood, and health.

Dash of Pepper!: The Depression, The Hobo, and the 1931 World Series is the first book about the 1931 World Series and its unlikely star, Johnnie Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin. Born in Oklahoma in 1904, Martin grew up in poverty, performing farm labor with his family and attending school only sporadically (he was eventually expelled for his lack of shoes). Local sandlots served as his introduction to baseball, bringing him into an unpretentious world of hand-me-down leather, battered balls bursting at the seams, and boyhood. He was immediately hooked.

Martin spent his adolescence working a variety of odd jobs and playing for even odder baseball teams before making a living as a player for the East Texas League beginning in 1925, the owner of which sold him to the St. Louis Cardinals later that year. Martin played for the Cardinals’ minor league affiliates for the next two years, all while continuing his boyhood habit of “hoboing” freight trains to travel to games. Promoted to the major leagues in 1927, Martin was sent back down to the minors two years later, making his return to the Big Leagues in 1931 and soon thereafter emerging as the star of that year’s World Series. Historians still credit Martin, with his .500 batting average, 4 doubles, 1 home run, and 5 RBIs, for the Cardinals’ taking the championship. 

Author Justin Wingerter documents the words of reporters from every state who told of a Depression-weary nation enthralled by the self-described hobo with endless hustle — “Don’t say Pepper, say STAR,” wrote The St. Louis Star (a play on its motto, “Don’t say ‘paper,’ say STAR”) after the Cardinals’ Game Three win. As Wingerter argues, Martin became a symbol of the forgotten man at a time when his fellow Americans needed a hero. His performance in the 1931 Series was followed obsessively by farmers, businesspeople, industrial workers, and even inmates, all of whom found in Martin a source of solace in a time of widespread misery. As one sportswriter opined in Waterloo, Iowa, “The Pepper Martins have a way of making us forget it all.” 

In Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter explores the 1931 World Series in the context of the era’s national mood, populating the book’s pages with a host of colorful characters reaching far beyond Martin: One-Eyed Connelly, the famed gatecrasher who eventually met his match; the masked assailants of the St. Louis Milk War, a violent labor action that shared the city’s frontpages with the Series; banking regulators rushing to save deposits at Philadelphia’s Franklin Trust, and more.

With Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter makes an original contribution to the field, its focus on American society making it particularly valuable to lovers of United States history in addition to baseball fans.

“Everything I know, I learned from skiing powder.”— Dolores LaChapelle, the godmother of powder skiing

An out-of-print classic returns… Deep Powder Snow, originally published in 1993, is an autobiographical account of how Dolores LaChapelle’s experiences powder skiing gave her a path to cultural resistance. More than a memoir of one woman’s love for the sport, this philosophical exploration of skiing and the relationship between humanity and nature became a cult classic for mountain recreationists around the world who connected deeply with her worldview.

LaChapelle’s words still give voice to why skiing and other outdoor recreation feel like so much more than a pastime to so many. In this reprint of the classic text, ski journalist and historian Clare George offers a new generation of readers the opportunity to engage with LaChappelle, adding a foreword with critical contextualization of the book’s significance and impact.

Deep Powder Snow is more relevant than ever. In the age of rapid climate change and the ever-more-jarring effects of the Anthropocene, this memoir advocates for a different way of thinking about our place in the world and of skiing as not merely a hobby but the foundation of a good life.

Sweeping and revelatory, Degrees of Difficulty tells a story of international friction, unexpected cooperation, and the legacy of abuse and betrayal created by the win-at-all-cost attitudes of the Cold War.

Remote desert locations, including the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, southern Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, draw adventurers of all kinds, from the highly skilled and well prepared to urban cowboys who couldn't lead themselves (much less a horse!) to water. David Alloway's goal in this book is to help all of them survive when circumstances beyond their control strand them in the desert environment. In simple, friendly language, enlivened with humor and stories from his own extensive experience, Alloway here offers a practical, comprehensive handbook for both short-term and long-term survival in the Chihuahuan and other North American deserts.

With an abundance of goods and services available to consumers in the sport industry, it can be difficult for products or organizations to stand out from the competition. Combining theoretical foundation with real-world examples, the updated fifth edition of Developing Successful Sport Marketing Plans guides readers through the sequential process of creating and implementing a winning marketing strategy—including understanding the market environment, defining target markets, developing marketing objectives and strategies, and evaluating the plan.

Esteemed scholar and author Mark S. Nagel joins internationally recognized academician David Stotlar in writing the revised fifth edition that includes updated information and examples, interviews with sport marketing professionals to provide insight into the industry, and worksheets to provide a hands-on guide to assist students in crafting a sport marketing plan.

Acquiring sponsorship agreements that are a good fit for both the sport organization and the corporation is one of the most crucial and challenging aspects of a sport manager’s job. In Developing Successful Sport Sponsorship Plans, 5th Edition, readers will have at their disposal a practical, step-by-step guide to identifying, soliciting, obtaining, and implementing appropriate and lucrative sponsorship opportunities.

Sponsorship activities have become an important revenue generating activity for professional, collegiate, and high school sport teams, local and state parks and recreation departments, sport and entertainment facilities, and for-profit and non-profit events. Knowing how to overcome the multitude of challenges to craft an effective sponsorship proposal and then manage sponsorship activities is more important than ever.

Esteemed scholar, author, and practitioner Mark S. Nagel joins award-winning academician David K. Stotlar in writing this new edition, which adds updated information, new interviews, and more depth and detail to what has proven to be the go-to guide for sport sponsorship courses since the first edition was released in 2001.

Developing Successful Sport Sponsorship Plans provides a detailed overview of the sponsorship process, including idea generation, research and planning, solicitation, pricing, writing contracts, and implementation and evaluation of sponsorship activities. Stotlar’s often-cited Sponsorship Evaluation Model incorporates those steps—sponsorship selection, activation, and evaluation—and is presented in a reader-friendly figure.

Combining theoretical foundations with practical applications, the book also offers interviews from practitioners to provide insight into the industry. The diverse scenarios discussed in each chapter include examples from different sports and from local, regional, national, and international sport events and organizations, as well as sponsorship options for individual athletes. Worksheets included throughout the book provide users with a hands-on guide for crafting a winning sport sponsorship proposal.

A classic portrait of hunting, sport, and gentlemanly culture in the antebellum South.

The least well known of Johnson Jones Hooper’s works, Dog and Gun was first published as a newspaper series, then appeared in six book editions between 1856 and 1871. Hooper is Alabama’s most celebrated antebellum author, and here he gives insight into the meaning of a culture where every male hunts – and a man who shoots as a gentleman will be assumed a gentleman. Beidler’s introduction to this reprint edition explores the social, literary, and technical dimensions of Dog and Gun, which he sees as an important commentary on class distinctions in the antebellum South, as well as a straightforward treatise on hunting.

Although the book is a manual for the hunter, with characteristic humor and a certain disdain, Hooper gives a full picture of the gentlemanly sport of hunting – clearly distinct from hunting for food – in all aspects including hunter, weaponry, and sporting dogs. He takes us back to an autumnal ritual of the hunt, where one is always a boy with his first gun – to the natural mystery of quest, competition, predation, pursuit, survival, bravery, endurance, and eventual defeat, called the mystery of the hunt.

As they compete in leagues around the world, elite women’s basketball players continually adjust to new cultures, rules, and contracts.

Courtney M. Cox follows athletes, coaches, journalists, and advocates of women’s basketball as they pursue careers within the sport. Despite all attempts to contain them or prevent forward momentum, they circumvent expectations and open new possibilities within and outside of the game. Throughout the book, Cox explores the intersection of race and gender against the backdrop of the WNBA, NCAA, and other leagues within the United States and around the world.  Blending interviews and participant observation with content analysis, she charts how athletes and advocates of women’s hoops illuminate new forms of navigating the global sports-media complex.

Timely and original, Double Crossover takes readers into the lived world of women’s basketball to shed light on the struggles, triumphs, and contributions of today’s players and those around them.

On August 26, 1960, twenty-three-year-old Danish cyclist Knud Jensen, competing in that year's Rome Olympic Games, suddenly fell from his bike and fractured his skull. His death hours later led to rumors that performance-enhancing drugs were in his system. Though certainly not the first instance of doping in the Olympic Games, Jensen's death serves as the starting point for Thomas M. Hunt's thoroughly researched, chronological history of the modern relationship of doping to the Olympics. Utilizing concepts derived from international relations theory, diplomatic history, and administrative law, this work connects the issue to global political relations.

During the Cold War, national governments had little reason to support effective anti-doping controls in the Olympics. Both the United States and the Soviet Union conceptualized power in sport as a means of impressing both friends and rivals abroad. The resulting medals race motivated nations on both sides of the Iron Curtain to allow drug regulatory powers to remain with private sport authorities. Given the costs involved in testing and the repercussions of drug scandals, these authorities tried to avoid the issue whenever possible. But toward the end of the Cold War, governments became more involved in the issue of testing. Having historically been a combined scientific, ethical, and political dilemma, obstacles to the elimination of doping in the Olympics are becoming less restrained by political inertia.

Zev Eleff tells the story of two immigrants’ sons shaped by a vision of an America that rewarded any person of virtue. As a player, the Chicago-born Horween had led Harvard to its 1920 Rose Bowl victory. As a coach, he faced intractable opposition from powerful East Coast alumni because of his values and Midwestern, Jewish background. Eleff traces Bingham and Horween’s careers as student-athletes and their campaign to wrest control of the football program from alumni. He also looks at how Horween undermined stereotypes of Jewish masculinity and dealt with the resurgent antisemitism of the 1920s.