Winning the Mind Game

American football, known in the United States simply as football and often as gridiron or tackle football outside North America, is a competitive team sport known for combining strategy with physical play. The objective of the game is to score points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. The ball can be advanced by carrying it (a running play) or by throwing it to a teammate (a passing play). Points can be scored in a variety of ways, including carrying the ball over the opponent's goal line, catching a pass thrown over that goal line, kicking the ball through the goal posts at the opponent's end zone, or tackling an opposing ball carrier within his end zone. The winner is the team with the most points when the time expires.

American football is closely related to Canadian football, but with significant differences.In the United States and Canada, the term "football" may refer to either American football or to the similar sport of Canadian football, the meaning usually being clear from the context. This article describes the American variant.

In the United States, the major forms are high school football, college football and professional football, which are essentially similar but feature slightly different rules.See 2006 NCAA Football Rules and Interpretations, Sec. 1, Art. 1

There have been numerous major professional football leagues in the U.S. The only one currently in existence is the National Football League (NFL), complemented by the United Football League (UFL).

The sport is also played outside the United States. National professional and collegiate leagues exist in United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden,Superserien on www.amerikanskfotboll.com (Swedish) Japan, Mexico, Israel, Spain, Austria, and several Pacific Island nations.

Archery is the art, practice, or skill of propelling arrows with the use of a bow. Archery has historically been used for hunting and combat; in modern times, however, its main use is that of a recreational activity. One who practices archery is typically known as an "archer" or "bowman," and one who is fond of or an expert at archery can be referred to as a "toxophilite."

Category: Image - :ArcheryGermanyEarly1980s-2.jpg|thumb|300px|Archery competition in West Germany in the early 1980s

Category: Image - :Brazilarcher.jpg|A Rikbaktsa archer competes at Brazil's Indigenous Games|thumb|300px

Category: File - :Bundesarchiv Bild 135-S-18-07-16, Tibetexpedition, Volksfest, Bogenschütze.jpg|thumb|300px|Tibetan archer. 1938.

Lacrosse is a team sport of Native American origin that is played using a small solid rubber ball and a long-handled racquet called a crosse or lacrosse stick. The head of the lacrosse stick is strung with loose netting that is designed to hold the lacrosse ball. Offensively, the objective of the game is to use the lacrosse stick to catch, carry, and pass the ball in an effort to score by ultimately hurling the ball into an opponent's goal. Defensively, the objective is to keep the opposing team from scoring and to depossess them of the ball through the use of stick checking and body contact or positioning. There are three main versions of the sport: men's lacrosse, women's lacrosse and box lacrosse.

Gymnastics is an activity and a sport involving performance of exercises requiring physical strength, flexibility, agility, coordination, balance and grace. Artistic gymnastics is the best known of the gymnastics sports governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG). Artistic Gymnastics, typically involves the women's events of uneven parallel bars, balance beam, floor exercise, and vault. Men's events include floor exercise, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, and high bar. Gymnastics evolved from exercises used by the ancient Greeks, that included skills for mounting and dismounting a horse, and from circus performance skills.

Other forms of gymnastics are rhythmic gymnastics, various trampolining sports, and aerobic and acrobatic gymnastics.

The activity can include children as young as three years old and sometimes younger doing kindergym and children's gymnastics, recreational gymnasts of all ages, competitive gymnasts at varying levels of skill, as well as world class athletes.

Skiing is a group of sports using skis as equipment for traveling over snow. Skis are used in conjunction with boots that connect to the ski with use of a binding.

Skiing can be grouped into two general categories. Nordic skiing, the older of the two disciplines, originated in Scandinavia and uses free-heel bindings that attach at the toes of the skier's boots but not at the heels. Types of nordic skiing include cross-country, ski jumping and Telemark. Alpine (often called "downhill") skiing, which began in the European Alps, uses fixed-heel bindings that attach at both the toe and the heel.

Track and field athletics is a collection of sports events that involve running, throwing, jumping and walking. Organised athletics are traced back to the Ancient Olympic Games from 776 BC, and most modern events are conducted by the member clubs of the International Association of Athletics Federations. The athletics meeting forms the backbone of the modern Summer Olympics, and other leading international meetings include the IAAF World Championships and World Indoor Championships.

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting against the pitcher of the other team (the fielding team), which tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases and later advance via a teammate's hit or other means. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs. One turn at bat for each team constitutes an inning; nine innings make up a professional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.

Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-eighteenth century. This game and the related rounders were brought by British and Irish immigrants to North America, where the modern version of baseball developed. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is now popular in North America, parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball, in contrast to the derivative game of softball.

In North America, professional Major League Baseball (MLB) teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the major league champion is determined by playoffs that culminate in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team. Baseball is the leading team sport in both Japan and Cuba, and the top level of play is similarly split between two leagues: Japan's Central League and Pacific League; Cuba's West League and East League. In the National and Central leagues, the pitcher is required to bat, per the traditional rules. In the American, Pacific, and both Cuban leagues, there is a tenth player, a designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each top-level team has a farm system of one or more minor league teams. These teams allow younger players to develop as they gain on-field experience against opponents with similar levels of skill.

Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of 5 players try to score points against one another by placing a ball through a 10 foot (3.048 m) high hoop (the goal) under organized rules. Basketball is one of the most popular and widely viewed sports in the world.

Points are scored by throwing (shooting) the ball through the basket from above. dunking and slamming the ball into the rim, or any other acrobatic styles to make the ball into the basket from any distance; the team with more points at the end of the game wins, but additional time(overtime) may be issued when the scores of both teams are the same. The ball can be advanced on the court by bouncing it (dribbling) or passing it between teammates. Disruptive physical contact (foul) is penalized and free throws will be issued if the player is fouled while shooting the ball and there are restrictions on how the ball can be handled (violations).

Through time, basketball has developed to involve many common techniques of shooting, passing and dribbling, as well as players' positions, and offensive and defensive structures. Typically, the tallest members of a team will play center or one of two forward positions, while shorter players or those who possess the best ball handling skills and speed, play the guard positions. While competitive basketball is carefully regulated, numerous variations of basketball have developed for casual play. In some countries, basketball is also a popular spectator sport.

While competitive basketball is primarily an indoor sport, played on a basketball court, less regulated variations played in the outdoors have become increasingly popular among both inner city and rural groups.

Cue sports (sometimes spelled cuesports), also known as billiard sports, are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick which is used to strike billiard balls, moving them around a cloth-covered billiards table bounded by rubber .

Historically, the umbrella term was billiards. While that familiar name is still employed by some as a generic label for all such games, the word's usage has splintered into more exclusive competing meanings in various parts of the world. For example, in British and Australian English, "billiards" usually refers exclusively to the game of English billiards, while in American and Canadian English it is sometimes used to refer to a particular game or class of games, or to all cue games in general, depending upon dialect and context.

There are three major subdivisions of games within cue sports:

*Carom billiards, referring to games played on tables without , including among others balkline and straight rail, cushion caroms, three-cushion billiards and artistic billiards

*Pool, generally played on a table with six pockets, including among others eight-ball (the world's most widely played cue sport), nine-ball, straight pool, one-pocket and bank pool.

*Snooker, which while technically a pocket billiards game, is generally classified separately based on its historic divergence from other games, as well as a separate culture and terminology that characterize its play.

More obscurely, there are games that make use of obstacles and targets, and table-top games played with disks instead of balls.

Billiards has a long and rich history stretching from its inception in the 15th century; to the wrapping of the body of Mary, Queen of Scots in her billiard table cover in 1586; through its many mentions in the works of Shakespeare, including the famous line "let's to billiards" in Antony and Cleopatra (1606?07); to the dome on Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello, which conceals a billiard room he hid, as billiards was illegal in Virginia at that time; and through the many famous enthusiasts of the sport including, Mozart, Louis XIV of France, Marie Antoinette, Immanuel Kant, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Washington, French president Jules Grévy, Charles Dickens, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Carroll, W.C. Fields, Babe Ruth, Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, and many others.

Cheerleading is a sportEx-cheerleader loses suit against student, school district after fall - CNN.com that uses organized routines that range from 1 minute to 3 minutes made from elements of tumbling, dance, jumps, cheers, and stunting to direct spectators of events to cheer on sports teams at games and matches and/or compete at cheerleading competitions. Cheerleaders draw attention to the event and encourage audience participation. The athlete involved is called a cheerleader. The National Cheerleading Association is one of the sanctioning bodies for cheerleading in the USA.

Cheerleading originates in the United States, and remains a predominantly American activity, with an estimated 1.5 million participants in all-star cheerleading. The growing presentation of the sport to a global audience has been led by the 1997 start of broadcasts of cheerleading competition by ESPN International and the worldwide release of the 2000 film Bring it On. Due in part to this recent exposure, there are now an estimated 100,000 participants scattered around the rest of the world in countries including Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Finland, France, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Dance (from French danser, perhaps from Frankish) is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, britannica used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance). Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports that incorporate dance, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances. Motion in inanimate objects may also be described as dances (the leaves danced in the wind), and certain musical forms or genres.

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as folk dance) to virtuoso techniques such as ballet. Dance can be participatory, social or performed for an audience. It can also be ceremonial, Category: :Category - :Competitive dance|competitive or erotic. Dance movements may be without significance in themselves, such as in ballet or European folk dance, or have a gestural vocabulary/symbolic system as in many Asian dances. Dance can embody or express ideas, emotions or tell a story.

Dancing has evolved many styles. Breakdancing and Krumping are related to the hip hop culture. African dance is interpretive. Ballet, Ballroom, Waltz, and Tango are classical styles of dance while Square and the Electric Slide are forms of step dances.

Every dance, no matter what style, has something in common. It not only involves flexibility and body movement, but also physics. If the proper physics is not taken into consideration, injuries may occur.

Choreography is the art of creating dances. The person who creates (i.e., choreographs) a dance is known as the choreographer.

Darts is a form of throwing sport where darts are thrown at a circular target (dartboard) hung on a wall. Though various different boards and games have been used in the past, the term "darts" usually now refers to a standardised game involving a specific board design and set of rules. As well as being a professional competitive activity, darts is a traditional pub game, commonly played in the United Kingdom (the first country to officially recognise darts as a sport), across the Commonwealth, the Netherlands, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

Diving is the sport of jumping or falling into water from a platform or springboard, sometimes while performing acrobatics. Diving is an internationally-recognized sport that is part of the Olympic Games. In addition, unstructured and non-competitive diving is a recreational pastime.

Diving is one of the most popular Olympic sports with spectators. Competitors possess many of the same characteristics as gymnasts and dancers, including strength, flexibility, kinaesthetic judgment and air awareness.

Category: Image - :Diving tower at the 2008 EC.jpg|thumb|upright|Diving tower at the 2008 Euros

China came to prominence several decades ago when the sport was revolutionized by national coach Liang Boxi and after intense study of the dominant Louganis. China has lost few world titles since. The success of Greg Louganis has led to American strength in diving internationally. Other noted countries in the sport include Italy, Australia and Canada.

Figure skating is an Olympic sport in which individuals, pairs, or groups perform spins, jumps, footwork and other intricate and challenging moves on ice. Figure skaters compete at various levels from beginner up to the Olympic level (senior), and at local, national, and international competitions. The International Skating Union (ISU) regulates international figure skating judging and competitions. Figure skating is an official event in the Winter Olympic Games. In languages other than English, figure skating is usually referred to by a name that translates as "artistic skating".

Major international competitions are sanctioned by the ISU. These include the Winter Olympic Games, the World Championships, the World Junior Figure Skating Championships, the European Figure Skating Championships, the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships, and the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating.

The sport is also associated with show-business. Major competitions generally include exhibitions at the end in which the top-placing skaters perform for the crowd by showing off their various skills. Many skaters, both during and after their competitive careers, also skate in ice skating exhibitions or shows which run during the competitive season and the off-season.

Table tennis is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight, hollow ball back and forth with rackets. The game takes place on a hard table divided by a net. Except for the initial serve, players must allow a ball played toward them only one bounce on their side of the table and must return it so that it bounces on the opposite side. Points are scored when a player fails to return the ball within the rules. Play is fast and demands quick reactions. A skilled player can impart several varieties of spin to the ball, altering its trajectory and limiting an opponent's options to great advantage.

The game is controlled by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), founded in 1926.

Since 1988, table tennis has been an Olympic sport which includes four events. From 1988 until 2004, the events were men's singles, women's singles, men's doubles and women's doubles. Since 2008 the doubles have been replaced by the team events (Beijing was the first time where table tennis had an Olympic team event).

The modern game of tennis originated in the United Kingdom in the late 19th century as "lawn tennis" which has heavy connections to various field/lawn games as well as to the ancient game of real tennis. After its creation, tennis spread throughout the upper-class English-speaking population before spreading around the worldHistory of Tennis. "[http://www.historyoftennis.net/history_of_tennis.html]". Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all ages. The sport can be played by anyone who can hold a racket, including people in wheelchairs. In the United States, there is a collegiate circuit organized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The rules of tennis have changed very little since the 1890s. Two exceptions are that from 1908 to 1960 the server had to keep one foot on the ground at all times, and then the adoption of the tie-break in the 1970s. A recent addition to professional tennis has been the adoption of electronic review technology coupled with a point challenge system, which allows a player to challenge the line (or chair) umpire's call of a point.

Tennis enjoys millions of recreational players and is also a hugely popular worldwide spectator sport, especially the four Grand Slam tournaments (sometimes referred to as the "majors"): the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open.

Gymnastics is an activity and a sport involving performance of exercises requiring physical strength, flexibility, agility, coordination, balance and grace. Artistic gymnastics is the best known of the gymnastics sports governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG). Artistic Gymnastics, typically involves the women's events of uneven parallel bars, balance beam, floor exercise, and vault. Men's events include floor exercise, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, and high bar. Gymnastics evolved from exercises used by the ancient Greeks, that included skills for mounting and dismounting a horse, and from circus performance skills.

Other forms of gymnastics are rhythmic gymnastics, various trampolining sports, and aerobic and acrobatic gymnastics.

The activity can include children as young as three years old and sometimes younger doing kindergym and children's gymnastics, recreational gymnasts of all ages, competitive gymnasts at varying levels of skill, as well as world class athletes.