League of Fans

By Ken Reed

I’ve often said there’s too much adult in youth sports.

Screaming, swearing, abusive, over-demanding, win-at-all-costs (WAAC) youth sports parents and coaches lead to high rates of emotional burnout among young athletes (70%-80% quit team sports by age 13).

We now know that the same group of over-the-top “adults” is driving referees […]

By Ken Reed

Taylor Branch is a well-known civil rights and presidential historian. His trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement is definitive.

That said, his work on college sports is also of the highest quality. In 2011, Branch wrote a highly-regarded feature article for The Atlantic summarizing this work entitled, […]

By Ken Reed

Josh Rosen has always been a progressive thinker. He’s also never shied away from sharing his ideas.

Those traits continue for the former UCLA quarterback and Arizona Cardinals rookie.

Along with a couple others, he’s come up with an economic justice proposal for the NCAA and its student-athletes.

Rosen likes college athletics […]

By Ken Reed

“There’s something to the play of football that damages the brain,” says Dr. Ann McKee, a Boston University neuropathologist and the world’s preeminent expert on CTE. “That, to me, is irrefutable.”

Andrew Lawrence has written a comprehensive feature article in Men’s Health on the dangers of football for kids with still […]

By Ken Reed

Major League Baseball (MLB) has increasingly become a game of strikeouts. A person can see more contact in the batting cage at the local amusement park than at an MLB stadium.

Batters are striking out in 22.3 percent of their plate appearances. That’s an all-time high and Major League Baseball is […]

By Ken Reed

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down […]

By Ken Reed

The unfortunate trend in youth and high school sports the last couple decades is toward specialization. Young athletes have increasingly chosen to focus on a single sport in their developmental years, often as young as eight or nine years old. (Perhaps more accurately, they’ve been strongly encouraged — some may say forced […]

By Ken Reed

Most people associate chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive brain disease caused by repetitive brain trauma, with the NFL — specifically retired NFL players.

But CTE is more than a pro football issue. While the Boston University CTE Center has discovered CTE in the brains of 110 of 111 former NFL […]

By Ken Reed

‘It is very much a moral dilemma’

The next lawyer that sues a university, or the NCAA, on behalf of a client who has suffered a brain injury due to playing football will definitely make use of some recent comments from a leader of the University of Colorado.

Linda Shoemaker, vice […]