. Feel free to agree or disagree with what writer Dave Begel has to say, but on his recent visit with Inside MMA Live with hosts Bas Rutten and Kenny Rice, he had several very specific and valid points to make about the sport of MMA, particularly about what he believes is a blatant exploitation of women and what he feels is the basic, primal motivator for a fan-base that watches a violent sport such as mixed martial arts. Here’s the 5-minute video, which is essentially 3-minutes of floundering debate by the hosts, and then another 2-minutes of desperate ridicule and disrespect. Kinda reminds...

In case you missed the fight last night between Frazer McLaren of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Dave Dziurzynski of the Ottawa Senators, here it is: Hockey fans love a good tilt (myself included), but with the seriousness and awareness of head injuries becoming more prevalent, it’s moments like these that scare the average hockey fan. Even the look on McLaren’s face afterwards demonstrated that he was hardly proud of the fact that he may have just altered (or ended) another athlete’s career. It just as easily could have been him laying on that ice and he knew it. It’s the...

Today, I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Niagara Storm President, Frank Trivieri, to talk about a few surprising changes to the Storm organization, and to discuss his thoughts on how these changes will now impact youth football throughout the entire Niagara and Hamilton Regions. Enjoy! James Ryan: So Frank, what’s the big announcement? What happened this past weekend? Frank Trivieri: Well, the big announcement is that we have been accepted into the Ontario Football Conference (OFC) whole-heartedly, and it’s now just a matter of being rubber-stamped, which is a formality as we’re...

. . “Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”―Eckhart Tolle A few months ago, I had decided to take a “temporary” break from sportswriting and blogging (even though I had announced it publicly as being a more permanent retirement) so that I could step back and work on several other personal and creative projects without having to deal with any other literary responsibilities, distractions or the pressure of a return date. And it worked. As a result of my brief hiatus, I am proud to...

“The public holds the coach responsible for the team. His orders must be obeyed. He is responsible for the system and the carrying out of the system, not necessarily the winning of the game.”—Coach Knute Rockne For as long as I’ve been coaching, I have come to expect certain on-field behaviours from each and every one of my players. How do my players know exactly what I expect from them? Simple—I tell them. And then I make the choice to lead by example. Football, we must remember, is an aggressive and violent sport, and therefore, without any of the proper adherences to the rules or to...

“Let us not hear of generals who conquer without bloodshed. If a bloody slaughter is a horrible sight, then that is a ground for paying more respect to war, but not for making the sword we wear blunter and blunter by degrees, from feelings of humanity, until someone steps in with one that is sharp and lops the arm from our body.”—Karl Von Clausewitz, On War For those of you who don’t already know, the whole point of the post-game handshake in any sport, win or lose, is to simply show respect for your opponents. A lot of times, emotions run extremely high in any competitive sport, and as...

The Niagara Storm Senior Varsity football squad have started this season off with two straight losses. That’s the bad news. The good news however, is that despite those losses, the Storm were extremely competitive throughout both of their games, and they did it with a very short, albeit incredibly talented roster of young players. “The schedule had us playing the two teams which competed for the OMFL championship last year,” said Head Coach Don Moses. “We could have won both of those games, but we found ourselves too short on the bench to finish.” In their first game against the Hamilton...

Over the past few years, I have become quite familiar with the Second Mile Charity Foundation based out of State College, Pennsylvania. After all, there’s a big 3-page introduction about it in one of my books entitled, 101 Linebacker Drills (written by Jerry Sandusky and Cedric X. Bryant), which in a way, has become very much like a “practice bible” when it comes to designing new and effective drills to run during our football practices. At the very least, it’s a book that I continue to, and will most likely always refer to, on a weekly basis. Today it was announced that the Second Mile,...

As an athlete, it can’t be easy being affiliated with a sport that so many others seem to either hold in contempt or don’t take seriously in the first place because it combines a popular and socially acceptable profession such as [fitness] modelling, with America’s favourite contact sport—football. Modelling is fine. Rarely do you ever hear people complaining that it undermines women’s rights. In fact, many women, especially those who actually model for a living, would argue that it easily empowers women in today’s society. Throw a brain in the mix and suddenly you have a super woman...

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”—Albert Einstein Hamilton Tiger-Cats Offensive Guard, Peter Dyakowski, 27, managed to break all common stereotypes which are typically associated with “big, dumb football players” by recently competing and winning on the CBC television show Canada’s Smartest Person. Matched up against a high-school science teacher, a physicist, and one of the top poets in Canada (interesting selections), Dyakowski, who himself was a Mechanical Engineering and History...