Why Do We Focus on Final Four, not the Actual Championship?

     Don't get me wrong, I love college basketball, March Madness, and especially all the attention that is put on this tournament.  I'm a huge fan of the game entirely.  The level of competition with its exclusion of cash-based incentive makes the sport a lot more exciting than professional basketball.  However, where did this tradition of full attention of the final four start?  Why not the final two, or the actual championship?

     After four rounds of games already played, there is a long and much needed break for the players before the start of the national semifinals.  This round is obviously extremely important and much anticipated by almost all of America.  Then again, two of the teams in this round aren't even going to be competing in the national championship.  There is tons of media coverage, interviews, and analysis solely based on these final four teams for about a week's span.  By the start of the national semifinals, you almost get sick of hearing anyone debate about who is going to win.  Even before the tournament, when everyone is filling out all their brackets crazily, the most common question I hear among any group has to be, "Who's your final four?"  Again, when it comes down to it, two of these teams will not even be competing in the national championship, so why don't we let all the excessive predictions and analysis come once we actually know who is playing in the finals?
     I fully expect many people to disagree with my point, but it is kind of an interesting topic to debate when you take a closer look.  One of the most renown sports tournaments in the country has put so much emphasis and is even titled The Final Four aka The Semi-Finals.  I just don't get why we all, including myself, anticipate the national semi-finals of such a great tournament, rather than the actual finals.  I also am not implying that the national championship does not receive enough coverage, which I am positive that it does get its fair share.  I'm merely suggesting to maybe get rid of the famous title The Final Four and start recognizing it simply as The NCAA Championship, as it should be.

United Way & the NFL: Pledge to Make A Difference

I am about to embark on a new journey; I was one of 32 college students, selected nationwide for the United Way Team NFL Player Partnership. The United Way Worldwide has partnered with the NFL for over 35 years. United Way believes there are "three key building blocks of a good life: Education + Income + Health." However, the only way to achieve success is through education. 

As a member of the NFL & Strategic Partnerships, Brand Leadership team, I get paired with an NFL player (a United Way Team Ambassador) from one of the 32 NFL teams. My partner is Chris Canty, Superbowl XLVI winner, and New York Giants' Defensive Tackle (#99); it gives me great pride — both as a college student, and as a New York Giants fan — to spread the word about what Canty and the other players in the NFL are accomplishing to make a difference in their communities. 

Chris Canty attends benefit for United Way of New York

Together, Chris Canty and I are working to recruit 1,000 volunteer readers, tutors and mentors, in an attempt to help United Way Worldwide achieve their goal of reducing the number of high school dropouts in half by 2018. In addition, Chris Canty has his own foundation. His organization uses sports to make a positive impact on children through mentoring, educational programming and engaging physical activities, while promoting health and well-being. 

Help Chris Canty HERE

I invite you, to join me, my partner Chris Canty, United Way and the NFL, to cut the dropout rate in half by becoming a volunteer reader, tutor or mentor:


PLEDGE HERE: http://www.unitedway.org/team-nfl/players/chris-canty/


*Did you know that 60% of all 4th graders in the U.S. cannot read proficiently? Did you also know that 25% of students fail to graduate on time?

Something must be done. How will WE do this? — with YOUR help. Please sign this pledge to help cut the high school drop out rate in half. Something needs to be done, and YOU can do it. Chris Canty and I CAN'T do this without you. The difference between a graduate and a dropout could be you.

Starving Myself from The Hunger Games

The Midnight Premiere of The Hunger Games is officially only 23 hours away, and just like any other person who has read The Hunger Games I am dying to see the movie...so why am I going to wait?

Right now I am currently in the middle of the second book Catching Fire. This book is amazing and I envision all of the scenes as if I were there. I have images in my head for Katniss, Gale, Peeta, Haymitch, President Snow, the Capitol, District 12, Katniss' home, the rebellions...all of it! I am enjoying this book so much that I actually don't want it to end! However, I won't let myself see the movie until I am finished with the complete trilogy.

I love keeping the images I have in my head of everything Hunger Games related. When reading the books, I like to have my own vision of this atmosphere, which is not yet affected by any third-party visions of the same story. Therefore, I have been trying to steer clear of all Hunger Games related publicity including all trailers, magazine articles, and news-related stories. Trust me...this task has been very difficult. It really seems as if The Hunger Games talk is permeating and ever-present; discussion of this movie comes up on TV, on Facebook, on websites, and in conversations with my friends. However, no matter how difficult it may be, I am on a mission to avoid all images of this movie until I am absolutely finished with The Hunger Games trilogy. This may be a daunting challenge, but I won't let anything get in the way of my vision of Katniss and her world.

So while everyone is off seeing The Hunger Games, I will be off somewhere playing my own game...avoiding this movie at all costs!

What do you all think about this task? Do you like completing a book before you see a movie to keep your own personal visions of the story? Or instead do you not mind having the images of the movie mix with your own imaginations of the same story?

Hungry for the Hunger Games

I finally understand societies’ infatuation with The Hunger Games. Having just completed the first book in the series, I must say, I’m definitely hooked. When I read the first book, I laughed, I cried, I gasped, and I smiled with a great deal of suspense. Who could have thought the game of love could last so long? 

It centers around its’ title, The Hunger Games; in which, a set of “Games” occur annually. Each of the 12 Districts in a city of the future have two children ages 12-18, compete for survival, in a quest called, “The Games.” Every year, during the ceremony known as “the reaping,” two children are selected from each of the 12 Districts to participate in the event. The 24 children are thrown into an arena, with a forest-esq ambiance, in which they fight until there is one person left standing. A person’s likelihood of being chosen to participate increase year after year. Thus as age increases, so does one’s chances of being selected.

This year, the public witnessed a set of games, which tested the limits of love, lust, extremity and will to survive as Katniss Everdeen—the girl from District 12, who can kill squirrels, rabbits, and people with one shot from her bow and arrow, and Peeta Mallamark—the “baker’s son,” were faced with the ultimate test: partnership. I made so many predictions as to how I imagined the first book would end (all of which were erroneous); but, regardless, I already began reading the second book. I developed unique conjectures of the characters in the book and let my imagination paint a picture. Until I finished the book, I refrained from watching any of the film's trailers. The first time I saw Lions Gate's portrayal of the film was during last week's episode of the Ellen Degeneres show, where they shared a brand new trailer with the audience; who would have thought Lenny Kravitz would assume the role of Cinna--the stylist for District 12!?  The book in and of itself is riveting, and at the end, leaves the reader yearning for more (hence why I had to buy the second book, IMMEDIATELY). 

My creative vision of the book's characters ceases to exist, thanks to an inundation of images from US media coverage. Regardless, I finished the first book and the frenzy is everywhere. The next chapter will begin when Lionsgate releases, The Hunger Games, worldwide on March 23, 2012. Side note: (I finished the book the minute my plane touched down at a New York airport. The cover of Glamour was the first magazine I saw upon arrival. Can you guess who's on the cover?)

Entertainment Weekly: Jennifer Lawrence

Glamour: Jennifer Lawrence

Flare Magazine

Seventeen

Details: Liam Hemsworth

People Magazine: Collector's Special 

Are Games all Fun?

Who decides what is a game and what is not a game?  Since I was very young, my notion of a game was a fun, harmless, fictional realm in which there were set rules and an ending with some desired reward.  However, as I get older I am exposed to more serious and less fictional "games."  What happens when a fictional game is brought into real life and is no longer harmless?  Is this still considered a game?  As seen in The Hunger Games as well as a recent Law and Order: SVU, there is evidence of games in which the human life is at risk.

In The Hunger Games, representatives from each district are competing in a televised competition for survival.  The rules state that there can only be one winner, forcing all participants to rambunctiously kill all others in the game.  This "game" is neither fictional, fun, nor harmless.  It threatens the lives of all participants.  Similarly, in the episode of Law and Order: SVU called Hunting Ground, a man kidnaps women and plays a "game" with them.  He directly states the rules of the game in that each woman must act as an animal and be waited to be hunted by him and his gun.  In a dense forest, he searches for each woman and kills them.  He tells each participant that the only way to win the "game" is to die.  Based on these two similar life-threatening "games", my concept of what a game is has drastically changed.  I no longer think of it as a childish activity that is fun and harmless.  I now know that games come in many different forms, including ones in which death is the ultimate prize.

Perspectives on Drug Testing in Athletics

www.icassp2006.org

On February 17^th, I attended an international sports law symposium hosted by the Michigan Sports Law Society.  For one of the topics, Howard Jacobs, one of the leading athlete’s lawyers in the United States, and William Bock III, who has served as General Council to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) since 2007, discussed their perspectives on drug testing in athletics.  Both agreed that doping in order to increase athletic performance should be considered cheating, but they disagreed over the ways in which USADA handles drug testing and prosecution of those athletes who test positive.

Mr. Bock opened by discussing the difficulty of actually catching dopers.  He used as an example a blog that tells dopers how to avoid testing positive.  He also showed how athletes could use extremely complex and exact routines that involve ingesting huge amounts of chemicals to avoid detection.  However, these detection avoidance routines involve a lot of money too.  As a consequence, the athletes that actually get caught doping are usually just the ones who can’t afford the extensive lab work and expensive physicians that these complex routines require.  Another consequence is that just because an athlete never tested positive for steroids doesn’t mean he or she never used them.

Mr. Jacobs argued that current testing results in too many false positives.  He believes that substances other than steroids or accidental consumption cause the majority of positives in drug tests, citing problems such as the notoriously bad quality control in the supplement industry and the general athlete attitude, ‘I’m not taking illicit substances, so I don’t have to worry.’  USADA spends too much money prosecuting these false positives when it should be spending its money developing more accurate drug tests.

If an athlete tests positive, the burden then lies with the athlete to prove their innocence.  Then, even if the athlete shows that the positive was caused by, for example, accidental consumption of a substance through a contaminated supplement, he or she is still penalized, though less so than an intentional doper.  Does this seem right?  Mr. Bock argued that some of these excuses are ‘dog ate the homework’ excuses.  Also, even if an athlete accidentally consumed a substance they still might be receiving its illicit benefits.  Is USADA going about its drug testing and prosecution the right way? 

Play AND Learn?

Every kid engages in several different games, whether it be by themselves or with other children around them.  My personal favorites were the game of LIFE, Guess Who?, Twister, and Chutes and Ladders.  These games all have set rules and are common among all childhood cultures in the United States.  As we learned in class, there are many benefits to children participating in these games.  Increased math skills and problem skills are among the most important.  I wonder where I would be if I never played these games.  Would I have liked math as much as I do? Would I have the same problem solving skills as I do now? And would my intelligence be at the level it is today allowing me to still be attending the University of Michigan? I never realized how much of an influence moving up and down ladders on a board game or simulating real life with game pieces would have on my life.  Because games are critical for a child’s development, most children play.  I find it unique that regardless of the environments in which we live, there is a shared “children’s culture” that is common among all kids.

Google v. Foursquare - Who Will Be the Winner?

According to ABC News, Google is directly taking on Foursquare and creating its own version of a location-service check-in game. Both of these services allow users to check into a location, share it with friends, and earn points on a leaderboard just for showing up.

The New Google Latitude Interface

The Established Website Foursquare

And even though both of these games are in competition with one another, Foursquare does not seem phased. Erin Gleason, a Foursquare spokesperson told ABC News "far from concentrating on what others are doing, we're 100 percent focused on continuing to build an amazing product that changes the way people experience the world around them."

I guess we will all have to wait and see whether the service Google Latitude or Foursquare prevails as the winner of the location check-in competition.

Best of luck to both competitors!