Posts Tagged ‘Challenges’

Greg Bennett racing for the USA

ST: In 2012, you will hit 40 and as far as I can remember only Rob Barel, who competed at Sydney at age 42, has competed in Olympic triathlon past the age of 40. do you have a chance?

Greg: Im no spring chicken. Im 38 now.

ST: you look 28.

Greg: thanks Tim. I still love the sport Im healthy and training hard and one of those things I love about triathlon is the challenge. the challenge of making the Olympic Games as a 40 year will be incredibly difficult. I know that the road I am on will be full of challenges because I set the bar for myself very high. And this sport is full of them.

ST: you dont seem to be losing your core speed. Even though you were fighting some injuries last year and did not dominate the Toyota Challenge/Life Time Fitness series, you whipped the field decisively at new York when you were on top of your game. what about now?

Greg: I had a 7th at Sydney this year in the World Championship Series opener and I was pleased with it. that said, I was not over the moon. I like to win but I was 7th after a long time away from ITU racing. so it was a nice place to start for me. My task now is balancing two styles of racing ITU draft legal along with my non-drafting racing in the USA. My plan is to keep in touch with ITU racing from now on. It has the hardest competition. No offense to other forms like Ironman and 70.3. But the longer the race, the challenge changes. In long course, the actual event is tough. whereas the shorter you go, the event itself may be easier in distance but it is made tough because of the speed and intensity and standard of competition.

ST: which is tougher?

Greg: In brief, there is no easy way or direction to go — long or short. When there are 90 guys on the start line of a World Cup or World Championship Series event, the standard is now extremely high. When I look at Ironman, you probably realize there are 15 guys who might win. so it is a different sort of math. In an Ironman, to do that distance alone is incredibly tough. we were talking about it the other night at dinner. When you go to an Ironman you have a different parameter for success than you do with ITU draft legal races.

ST: Speaking of higher standards of competition, ITU racers like Alistair Brownlee and Javier Gomez have been timed in the low 29 minutes running the final 10k of Olympic distance events. Even if those runs are at times short of the advertised distances, the standards of the ITU runs are higher than ever. recently Tim Don finished a road race 10k under 29 minutes and within one minute of the legendary Haile Gebrselassie, which makes the 29-minute mark in triathlon at least plausible.

Greg: Tim Dons was an impressive run. In all fairness to the ITU, while I get a little disappointed when they are not 100 percent accurate, I think the top runners really are approaching that standard. While international road races have accurately measured courses, ITU triathlons most often have four lap runs. A fair run race should have no dead stop U-turns as we do many times in ITU races. Those kinds of turns slows the overall time by 3-5 seconds each, so as much as distances are off in ITU, sometimes by as much as a quarter mile, when you add up the dead stop U-turns, they almost balance out to a pretty accurate time for the 10k.

Greg Bennett racing for the USA

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Four Common Sports Parenting Challenges

I’m a youth soccer coach and sports mom/stepmom to four young athletes aged 8 to 19. Our kids dance, skate, ski, run cross-country, and play soccer, lacrosse, football and basketball.

As a sports parent, I’ve dealt with sports kids who:

1. Are stars in practice but choke up during competition (and then get angry at themselves).

2. Worry too much about what their coaches and teammates think of them.

3. Don’t know how to communicate with coaches who give negative feedback.

4. Feel pressured to play—even when they’re sick or injured.

These are just a few of the tough situations I’ve faced over the past 14 years, since our oldest first began playing sports at age five, These are challenging situations, and I can tell you, the answers aren’t easy to come by!

For example, what do you say to a child or teen who regularly gets angry at himself for making mistakes during a game?

You can help your child modify his expectations about making mistakes. Sometimes kids try to be too perfect on the playing fields and expect to not make any mistakes. Modifying their expectations can help them perform without the burden of constant frustration.

Every day as sports parents, you face so many other tough—and interesting—situations. Believe me, how you react to these issues is critical to your child’s self-confidence and success as an athlete! (I’ve made enough mistakes to know).

One really important challenge for kids in sports today is a phenomenon called social approval. Young athletes with social approval challenges focus too much on what they think others may or may not be thinking about them. We also call this mind reading because young athletes have no idea about what others are really thinking!

They often make things up and things that are not really positive or confidence-enhancing. It’s your job as a sports parent to be aware of such mental game challenges. You can become the “mental game” coach in ways that boost your kids’ confidence and happiness in sports.

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Career colleges good for economy – Harris N. Miller – POLITICO.com

President Barack Obama has called for the United States to produce more college graduates than any other nation by the year 2020. you can almost hear the skeptics questioning whether our educational system can meet the challenge.

But this goal is essential for the recovery of our struggling work force and battered economy. Unemployment is hovering around 10 percent, and working Americans need new skills to succeed in new and better jobs. Our companies — and our country — are competing in an unforgiving global economy in which increasing the competence of workers and the quality of products and services can mean the difference between recovery and continuing recession.

Though the goal is achievable, we as a nation won’t be able to meet it unless we think imaginatively and act innovatively. According to one study, to graduate a higher percentage of adults with college degrees by 2025 than our economic rivals, the United States will need to graduate an additional 63 million students. under current conditions, according to experts, we will fall short by 16 million.

The nation’s institutions of higher education confront big challenges that undermine their ability to meet this goal. States are slashing funding for higher education, forcing many public colleges and universities to cut programs and staff. The endowments of private liberal-arts colleges are sinking along with the stock market, which pressures the schools to focus on recruiting students from higher-income families. Beset by the same budget cuts as four-year public institutions, community colleges are turning students away or creating multiyear waiting lists for specialized programs.

As a result, more people are looking to private-sector career colleges. Numbering almost 3,000, these colleges currently educate more than 2.75 million students — roughly 10 percent of the nation’s higher education students.

Career colleges good for economy – Harris N. Miller – POLITICO.com

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The Challenges in Financing Sports

In earlier times the marketing manager of an athletic team would project sales, the engineering and production staffs would determine the assets necessary to meet those demands, and the financial manager’s job was simply to raise the money needed to purchase the required plant, equipment and inventories. That situation no longer exists. Decisions are now made in a much more coordinated manner, and the financial manager generally has direct responsibility for the overall financial status of any business.

According to theory, a healthy economy depends on efficient transfers of funds from people who are net savers to firms and individuals who need funds. Without efficient transfers, the economy simply can not function. Thus, sport businesses, as individuals and government units, often need to raise funds. Stock exchange markets, merges, acquisitions, promotional techniques, athletes’ transfers, diversification, product or market development and syndicated loans, constitute methods for increasing cash flow levels.

But since some clubs and sport unions, spent more than they can afford, it is more than obvious that they will accrue dept and losses. As ticket sales have severely dropped over the years, agreements have collapsed and governments have not yet engaged themselves in financing clubs, the interested parties have tried to find ways of minimizing the losses, such as cutting down players wages or not renewing their contracts. Actually, financing a sport and keep the interest in high levels, both in the athletes’ and in the funs’ circles, is a difficult task that clubs have to work with. One of the practices in order to put an end in the expenses of clubs was the decision to pay athletes in relation to their performance. Bonus deals did not found always the athletes agreeing to such a policy, as their solicitors claim that ‘regardless the game’s outcome, players are still doing the same job so they should be paid what was in their original contract.’

Innovation and careful financial planning-like the new emerging market of stadium construction, debt refinancing and revolving loans-are considered as the prime considerations of any sports organization if it plans to excel. Additionally, fierce competition, environmental trends and demand fluctuation play a very important role regarding financial backing. However, some observers see an opportunity for investors, as low trading and share prices dropping are considered ‘good’ times to invest. Some experts believe that merges and acquisitions, related or unrelated to the core of the sport business, is a current issue of great concern for most sports financial managers, as it can save firms from losses.

Establishing higher prize money can also lead sports firms towards success by reducing risk and uncertainty to the interested parties. In 2002, for instance, British racecourses earned 46 million pounds from media deals, but only 5 million was distributed as prize money-a mere 11%. The British horseracing Board, response was to announce a plan to raise minimum prize money in 2003 by 18 million pounds. In fact, fair distribution of prize money can alter the financial condition of the sport and provide a safer environment in such a competitive industry.

Reduced revenue required companies to reduce costs by minimizing funding, cutting work force and spending less in sports sponsorships and advertising. For example, Investing in infrastructure is considered more serious than funding the Olympic bid. Consequently, the financial manager looks over the funding as money that can be spread out into schools, coach wages and sport clubs.

Sports business operates as a money generator if top management strives for excellence and performs continuous environmental scanning techniques. The main factor that distinguishes winners from losers is the eagerness to win competition and excel. Talent correlates nowadays with character promotion. When these two are combined can be translated to ticket sales, sponsorships, or image transformations.

The Changing Dynamics Of News In India & Challenges

An economy that’s growing at 8.5% and a very bright outlook for the future…that’s the India story at it’s best. But, the unmentioned success story, which in a way completes the picture, is the free press that our 60 year old democracy has managed to sustain.

Going back to 1870 when India’s first newspaper – The Bengal Gazette – to today’s plethora of newspapers and news channels; the media industry has come a long way. However, a little bit of analysis on the growth of media in India, who mostly serve India news reveals that the actual growth and the steep growth curve actually happened only later with the advent of the vernacular press.

This shift from the major languages, Hindi & English, towards regional languages made sense considering the diversity in the country. Here in India dialects change every few hundred kilometers and languages change from state to state. To effectively make people understand what all that’s important to them, news in one word, it was vital that they be addressed in their language.

That’s why, the vernacular press has done exceedingly well in India. The same idea was carried forward first by the radio and then by the visual media. No matter how important the national level news channels in Hindi and English may be, people across India do keep a tab on the news channels that offers them news in their own language. The common man simply loves to understand news in the language he is most comfortable in.

This way latest news India slowly became latest news from Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore etc.

Moreover, this localization of content also ensured that breaking news, the mainstay of a news channel, also got a local flavor. So, one has breaking news from Delhi or Mumbai etc. News was essentially local in nature but due to the localization of the channels content policy, such news also got prominence.

But the addition of more local content in a way is leading to the dilution of the media’s core competencies. That perfect balance between what’s important on a local level and what’s important when it came to the bigger picture was still wanting.

Welcome, to the world of Internet news. An arena where news is served piping hot, latest news and breaking news concepts work and at the same time a judicial mix between international, national, vernacular and local content could be achieved with finesse.

The Internet news model holds great promise for a country as diversified as India. News, anywhere, anytime is something this model can indeed deliver. However, on the flip side, the low penetration of Internet in India is slowing down the advent of the Internet arena in India. As of 2008, there are 60,000,000 Internet users-comprising 6.0% of the country’s population-in India.

But for Internet to perform at its best level there has to be a broadband connection. All that is considered as USPs of Internet; namely the seamless integration of content with video and a lot of interactivity thrown in, would perform at their optimum only on a super fast broadband connection.

There is a sense of inevitability to the world we live, what has to happen will eventually happen. If these prophetic words hold true for one change, certainly, then it is the advent of the era of Internet news in India. Wait & watch…the coming times are going to be exciting for news genre!