Wallabies hooker David Porecki retires from rugby
Rugby Australia issued a statement Tuesday saying the 32-year-old Porecki, who sustained a heel injury last week, was retiring immediately and ending a career that included five seasons in Britain with Saracens and London Irish from 2015.
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USA Today
5 hours ago
- USA Today
'Work of the devil'? Authors, dads test limits of travel sports
BERKELEY, CA - 'You want to see what Americans care about?' Michael Lewis asks. You probably know Lewis. He takes sports and societal narratives – the sabermetric undercurrent, a homeless kid seemingly born to be a left tackle, the careful yet tough influence of a high school coach – and turns them into influential books. The really good subjects, he has found, are right under your nose and no one is saying anything about them. That eventually becomes impossible. Take travel sports. 'Go to a 10 year old softball game and watch the parents,' Lewis said in March at the Project Play Summit. 'They care about that more than anything.' Across campus at the University of California, another author, Richard Reeves, raised within a British youth sports system much more infatuated with playing than the material things you can get from sports, offered this reading of the landscape: 'Travel sports, the work of the devil.' Reeves' three sons were around middle school age when he and his wife brought them over from the United Kingdom to America, and into the so-called youth sports industrial complex. 'You've got these kids being hauled around the country and think they got to do this, parents shouting in their ears and they had scouts there and individual coaches,' he tells USA TODAY Sports. 'I was horrified by the culture around it.' Lewis had two softball-playing daughters and, like so many of us, gave himself to their careers. 'The most pathetic character inside it is the one who's paying for it all,' Lewis writes in 'Playing to Win,' his 2020 audiobook that details life in the complex. 'The sports parent funds the entire operation but is regarded by everyone else as expendable. The central truth of this elaborate mechanism we've built so that our children might compete against each other might be this: How little a parent can do to help the child. As a result, the overwhelming emotion of the sport parent is anxiety.' But would he do it again? It's a question he thought about as he wrote, and as he spoke to the crowd at Project Play five years later about what has become a $40 billion industry. The two authors (and dads) offer perspective on their zany escapades within travel ball and advice on how we can negotiate it – or perhaps avoid it entirely. Travel and youth sports can give parents a 'moral education' Lewis has raised two daughters and a son with his wife, Tabitha Soren. Soren thought softball would be a nice way for dad and his young daughters, Quinn and Dixie, to bond. What could go wrong? Ther local softball league was founded by Cal religion professor Harlan Stelmach under the premise it existed for the 'moral education of parents.' It was against the rules to talk about the score, or even to use verbs from the stands to instruct or criticize your daughter while she was playing. 'Left to their own devices, children playing sports make it fun,' Stelmach said. 'It's when adults get involved that the problems arise.' The goal was a .500 record, and an evaluation was held to select teams balanced equally by skill. But dad coaches whose daughters were good players told their children to 'tank' their formal evaluations so they would be undervalued. The rules were about adult behavior. 'You're not just teaching the kids, you're teaching the parents,' he says. 'Most of the competitive landscape was Daddy ball,' Lewis says. 'It was dads who cared too much, who were frustrated by their own lack of success as baseball players, whose wives had seen this is the one way to interest their husband in their daughter was to get them into competitive sports and have them run their sporting lives.' Haley Woods, an All-American catcher and power hitter at Cal who coached Dixie Lewis when she became a competitive travel player, had a poignant message for parents. It's what we need to understand when our kids are young: Don't see them as who you wish them to be, but for who they are. Growing up in England, Reeves played sports all the time, with no infatuation with what he might become. Rugby didn't help you get into Oxford, anyway. 'I wasn't very good at anything, but my dad coached rugby,' Reeves says. 'He'd played. We'd cut a hole in the fence so we could get into the school tennis courts, and they looked the other way, and summers were spent on the tennis courts. I never had an hour of tennis coaching in my life, but I'm an OK tennis player as a result. … 'I was fortunate enough to grow up with a very clear sense from my parents of the joy and the value of sport, but always on the play side. … I lived in fear of one of my kids getting good enough to play travel sports.' Reeves wrote the 2022 book, 'Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About it.' His session at Project Play addressed youth coaches and administrators looking for ways to engage more boys in sports as their participation numbers are plummeting. Problems with boys and girls sports can arise when we get out of our comfortable communities and into the industrial complex. 'It's like, you have these small furry creatures who have been raised on an island without predators,' Lewis says. We toss them into the jungle, and our education continues. Observing travel sports can be a pill for improving a child's character At some point, with players' and parents' inner ambition brimming beneath the surface, the Berkeley softball league formed a travel team. Lewis' older daughter, Quinn, was 9. Now they were driving an hour away to play. At first they got pummeled, which tested the adults' limits' of frustration. 'At a kid's ballgame, you're never quite sure who's going to go mad - only that someone will,' Lewis writes in 'Playing to Win.' No trait - education level, income, race or gender – was predictive of it, he observed. The explosion happened to the Berkeley parents the first time the team was close to winning. Near the end of the game, one of their runners slid into home. The umpire called her safe. Lewis recalled four opposing coaches running out of the dugout and screaming at her, profanities flying. The umpire started to cry. 'The Berkeley parents were always very good at not being the first one to throw a punch,' Lewis said, 'but (they) are always on a hair trigger for other parents' bad behavior. So their coaches get their fans riled up, they're all screaming at the ump. The Berkeley parents are then outraged. 'On the field, they're like 20 little girls looking back and forth, with 70 parents screaming at the top of their lungs, veins popping, faces red. Through the noise - and the din was incredible - you heard this Berkeley mom shriek, What horrible modeling for our children.' The umpire tossed the opposing head coach. He then told her he was director of facilities and said she was fired. Lewis followed her as she moped toward the parking lot. He had to give her a pep talk to stay. 'I remember having this feeling like, yeah, on the surface, it is horrible,' he said. 'On the other hand, softball became one way to show my children - and then basketball with my son - how not to behave as a grown-up. 'Mostly what they got from grown-ups was a lot of artificial behavior, like polite grown-up behavior. When they saw the mask come off, then we can have a serious talk about how you behave and shouldn't behave.' It's a tactic Jeff Nelligan, another sports dad and commentator on American parenting I've interviewed, used with his three sons. Daily life, he writes, offers advice moms and dads can't concoct on their own: good, bad, and inspirational. Our job, Nelligan says, is to judge what we see. 'Every single one of us makes judgments about people and situations throughout our day,' he writes. 'It's the only way to successful navigate through life.' We learn about the length people go for our kids, and when we go too far. Perhaps for Lewis, it was when he went to Cal's women's softball team and, in his words, 'threw a sack of money' at its players to coach the Berkeley team and reverse their losing. Or when he was interviewing then-President Barack Obama for a story aboard Air Force One. When they arrived in Washington, the president asked Lewis to ride back to the White House to continue their discussion. Lewis said he had to rush home for a girls softball tournament. COACH STEVE: Ranking the 6 worst youth sports parents Don't look at travel sports as something that will play for college, but as a learning experience The next time you're at your child's game and want to say something out loud, pretend you are on a national stage. With social media documenting everything, you essentially are. Best mound visit ever. Listen to this. This should go viral. Amazing and what it's all about. Baseball is fun and this coach absolutely gets it Before you speak, think about what you are about to say, whether it be an in-game instruction to your kid, who might just glare at you, or a jab at another parent, which will make you a spectacle. Sports parenting is a lot like driving, Lewis writes. He says you want to go over and scream at the coach who benched your child like you want to give the finger to the person who cheated at the four-way stop sign. But 24 hours later, you have trouble even remembering why you got so upset. Your exercise can start when your kids are young, when the stakes are much lower, nonexistent really. What you stop yourself from saying might teach you something about the industrial complex you are about to enter. Reeves, the British author, says he came into it blindly. 'I think this whole college thing, the selection thing, the scholarship thing, it's putting this downward pressure on youth sports that is very distorting, and I don't know what to do about it, but I do know that we survived it,' he says. 'We were never parents trying to get the kids into these highly selective colleges who would like do oboe on Tuesday and lacrosse on Wednesday and their nonprofit on Thursday and the Mandarin class on Friday. 'God, it was exhausting. I was like my kids are just gonna go to a state college and they'll be fine.' One of his sons, Bryce, wound up on a travel soccer team and got injured. At that point, the family decided they didn't want the scene to infiltrate their life any further. 'Saturdays are for the sofa,' he says. 'They're not for getting up at 6 to drive to New Jersey.' Lewis spent five years of nearly 30 hours per week running his childrens' sports and 10 as commissioner of the travel softball league, mostly to the objections of his wife. 'In the beginning (it) was, 'How sweet, Michael's getting very involved in the daughter's lives,' Lewis says, 'and then it's like, 'Wait, we're spending 52 nights a year at the Hampton Inn in Manteca?' … 'Her view is there was a price that was paid, and the price was that our life was less diversified. It was more specialized, even if it wasn't specialized in a single sport. It was severed but it was all or nothing, and the kids all approached it that way. They were all really into it.' Dixie had a drive that was different, her dad thought. As a young teenager, she had sought out Haley Woods' Cal Nuggets softball team on her own and made the team. She threw herself into the journey and experience. She played in front of college coaches, and she found a role model. 'Everything she says to me, I take seriously, and there's so few grown-ups I feel that way about,' she told her father about Woods. 'She has a lot to say that's really useful to me.' COACH STEVE: 'Is it worth it?' Red flags to watch with youth sports programs Always play sports for the love of them, not matter how old you are Lewis admits the tens of thousands spent on travel ball fees, private lessons and travel costs and the pursuit of athletic scholarships is much better invested in a 529 college fund. Still, he also adds, 'My view of all this was that there's so many things you can learn through this experience that what sacrifice was involved was totally worth it.' Lewis and his daughter observed that top softball schools barely acknowledged ones that couldn't offer athletic scholarships. Dixie found top academic schools that also had softball teams were surprising accessible. As they walked around the campus of Division III Pomona College after she had committed there, she told her dad the travel ordeal had been worthwhile. 'Look where it got me,' she said. 'I feel so good about myself and where I am. I wouldn't change anything.' Dixie died in a 2021 car accident during her freshman year of college. Lewis almost gave up writing. He didn't because it was something that made him feel better. He draws deep satisfaction in knowing, amid his sorrow, his daughter chose her own path through youth sports, and she wound up at her dream school. Lewis, though, fully acknowledges that about half the young athletes in America have been priced out of the industrial complex. Youth sports participation as a whole, Aspen Institute research has found, falls off sharply by age 11. Reeves' son, Bryce, is now a Baltimore city public schools teacher and girls soccer coach. He plays on the Baltimore City FC amateur soccer squad. 'That makes me so happy,' his father says. 'I think there's something beautiful to just watching kids running around and having a great time. I'm here to make the case for mediocrity. And the trouble is, that doesn't sound very inspiring.' Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons' baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here. Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Horse rider dies after falling at fence during major eventing competition
A horse rider has died after falling at a fence during a major eventing competition in Northamptonshire. Sarah Yorke could not be saved by medical professionals after the accident at the third fence at the Aston-le-Walls Horse Trials on Friday, British Eventing. All competition due to take place yesterday was abandoned. The 37-year-old's horse, MGH HERA, was uninjured after being assessed by the on-site vets and walked back to the stable. Eventing is a where the same horse and rider combination compete against other competitors across the three disciplines of dressage, cross-country, and show jumping. Read more from Sky News: British Eventing described the death of Ms Yorke as "a deeply difficult moment for the eventing community" and said there would be a full review of what happened. Chief executive Rosie Williams said: "On behalf of everyone at British Eventing, I would like to express our deepest condolences to Sarah's family and friends. "The thoughts of the entire eventing community are with them at this incredibly difficult time."
NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
One of England's oldest soccer clubs is in crisis — fans are worried it could disappear
LONDON — One of the world's oldest soccer teams is in big trouble. When Sheffield Wednesday FC kicks off the new season on Sunday — away at Leicester City in the Championship, the second tier of British soccer — more than 3,000 traveling fans will not take their seats to cheer on their beloved team, known as the Owls. Instead, they will hold a five-minute protest outside Leicester's King Power Stadium against one man: Thai businessman Dejphon Chansiri, Wednesday's owner and the focal point of a growing crisis that may threaten its very existence. The team's financial problems are mounting, and unsuccessful attempts to sell it have dominated local sports media and online forums for months — and the crisis has much wider implications for the health of English soccer away from the glitzy riches of Liverpool and Manchester City. The problem is so acute that the British government has passed a new law that will launch a football regulator to police the buying and selling of teams and make sure owners are 'fit and proper.' For Wednesday, founded in 1867, that could be too little, too late. Some teams have bad offseasons, but this summer has seen Wednesday set new levels of chaos: Players and staff have not been paid on time in four of the last five months. As a result, there's a transfer embargo banning the club from buying new players until January 2027 — even if it could afford them. At least 15 players have left on free transfers or for a fraction of their market value this summer, leaving barely enough players to fill a match day squad of 11 starters and up to nine substitutes. 'It's becoming a soap opera,' said Dan Fudge, who co-hosts the popular podcast 'The Wednesday Week.' 'Usually, as podcasters, we're scratching for content to talk about during the summer,' Fudge said, 'but we seem to have had a new timeline of terror every single week to talk about.' The list of mishaps goes on. Talented young head coach Danny Rohl, a charismatic and cerebral German touted for big success in major European leagues, left by mutual agreement. The famous old Hillsborough Stadium is literally falling apart — Sheffield City Council refused to grant a safety license for the vast 9,000-seat North Stand due to concerns of uncovering wiring and cracks in the terrace. The club said in a statement this week it was working to fix this and would seek to place season ticket holders elsewhere if it was still shut by the first home game on Aug. 16. A disabled fan whose accessible seat is in the North Stand broke down in tears this week when telling the BBC what effect the crisis is having on him. Chansiri says he wants to sell, but no one so far has met his valuation for the club, which football finance experts say is too high. The owner is widely reported to have offered the club for 100 million pounds ($134 million). Kieran Maguire, a leading British football finance expert and commentator, puts the real value at 40 million pounds ($53 million), but Chansiri said in June that he rejected an offer at this price from a U.S.-based consortium. Maguire said it was unlikely Wednesday would go bust entirely, but he said that in any case the team would almost certainly be relegated to the league below and face a very tough season. 'He's not malicious in the sense that he doesn't want to destroy the football club, but he's very naive, has no knowledge of the industry,' Maguire said. English football culture is one of spending. This summer alone, the 20 Premier League teams have spent around 1.8 billion pounds ($2.4 billion) on transfer fees, with reigning champions Liverpool splashing out 252 million pounds ($335 million). And the contrast between the top and the rest of the football pyramid system is stark. Between them, the Premier League clubs made more than 6 billion pounds ($8 billion) in revenue in the 2024-25 season, an increase of 36% from the previous year, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. Meanwhile, every single team in the Championship, the fifth-most attended league in Europe, made an operating loss in the same period for the second season in a row. There is money from TV, sponsorship, player sales and match day revenue, but with huge wage bills, clubs are left to rely on player sales and, if they're lucky, wealthy benefactors to inject cash. The English Football League said Wednesday it was in 'advanced discussions' with Chansiri's lawyers on how he will sell his stake in the club. The league, criticized by some fans for not acting sooner, warned the Thai magnate that the club needed to 'meet its obligations or make good on his commitment to sell to a well-funded party, for fair market value.' Could things even get worse? Probably. This week, Morecambe FC, a team in the northwest seaside town of the same name, was suspended from the National League, the fifth tier of English football's sprawling pyramid-shaped league system, with the elite clubs at the top and smaller, more parochial clubs toward the bottom. Morecambe failed to meet its financial obligations, and if a new buyer who can support it can't be found, it could disappear for good. This happened to Macclesfield Town, Bury, Hereford and a handful of other teams whose owners couldn't support them and whose liabilities were too great. 'There's a sense of foreboding about the club. We've seen other clubs do it, and normally at the eleventh hour someone comes in and [stages] a takeover,' Fudge said. 'Then, over recent years, you look at teams like Bury and what's recently happened to Morecambe, and they've not had that white knight step in, and all of a sudden we're thinking, 'Oh hang on a minute, we could be the big scalp.'' Like many fans, Fudge has no doubt who is to blame. 'Pure ineptitude is how we've got here, regardless of the warning signs around Chansiri since about 2018.' Fans warmly remember the 1990s, when players such as Chris Waddle, David Hirst and Des Walker — all England internationals — lined up alongside some of the then-hottest talent in Europe, helping the club reach seventh place in the Premier League during the 1996-97 season. Fans were optimistic when Chansiri — a scion of Thai Union Group, a seafood conglomerate that owns the Chicken of the Sea canned tuna brand in the U.S. — took over in 2015. He promised and delivered some success, taking the team to the 2016 Championship playoff final, just 90 minutes away from a return to the Premier League. All this feels like a long, long time ago, with fans wondering what shape the new football regulator will take and whether it will make any difference. David Blunkett, a senior minister during Tony Blair's government in the 1990s and 2000s and now a member of the House of Lords, is a lifelong Wednesday fan and attended an online meeting with the football league on Thursday. He said it was 'vital' that the crisis at Wednesday is addressed before the regulator is set up. 'Parliamentarians, including those representing the city, the Supporters' Trust and other fans will clearly continue to pressurize for an immediate resolution of the crisis at Hillsborough,' he told NBC News. Hailing from the north side of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, a city famous for its steel, Wednesday became an early member of the Football Association (the term 'soccer' is an abbreviation of 'association'), as the football craze swept through working-class communities across the North and the Midlands. The team got its unique name from cricket: In the mid-19th century, there were multiple teams in Sheffield playing this game, and the one that played on Wednesdays started a football team. The name stuck. On Sunday, fans will raise banners and shout slogans in an attempt to preserve that history. Even if some would rather just watch the game. 'There's a lot of people that are very much in the camp of 'Let's protest, let's get this message out as much as we can,' which I completely agree with, but it's not everybody's bag, because a lot of people use the football to spend time with their family and their friends,' Fudge said. Despite the turmoil at the club, Wednesday sold out its allocation of 3,287 away tickets for Sunday's game. It's not immediately clear how many more Wednesday games there will be.
