American football, known in the United States and Canada simply as football,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. is a competitive team sport known for mixing strategy with physical play. The objective of the game is to score points by advancing the ballTechnically, the ball is a prolate spheroid. See 2006 NCAA Football Rules and Interpretations, Sec. 1, Art. 1 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 goal line, catching a pass from beyond the goal line, tackling an opposing ball carrier in his own end zone, or kicking the ball through the goal posts on the opposing side. The winner is the team with the most points when the time expires.

The sport is also played outside the United States. National leagues exist in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Japan, Mexico, Israel, Spain and several Pacific Island nations. The National Football League, the largest professional American football league in the world, ran a developmental league in Europe from 1991?1992 and 1995?2006.

American football is closely related to Canadian football, but with significant differences. Both sports originated from rugby football.

Archery is the practice of using a bow or crossbow to shoot arrows. Archery has historically been used in hunting and combat and has become a precision sport. A person practicing archery is called an archer, and one who is fond of or an expert at archery is sometimes called a toxophilite.

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

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

Lacrosse is a full contact team sport played using a solid rubber ball and long handled racket called a crosse or lacrosse stick. The head of the crosse has a loose net strung into it that allows the player to hold the lacrosse ball. Offensively the object 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 object is to keep the opposing team from scoring and to dispossess them of the ball through the use of stick checking and body contact. There are three distinct versions of the sport: men's lacrosse, women's lacrosse, and box lacrosse.

Gymnastics is a sport involving performance of exercises requiring physical strength, agility and coordination. Artistic Gymnastics is the best known and most popular of the gymnastics sports governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG). It typically involves exercises on uneven bars, balance beam, floor exercise, and vault (for women), and high bar, parallel bars, still rings, floor exercise, vault, and pommel horse (for men). It evolved from exercises used by the ancient Greeks, including skills for mounting and dismounting a horse, and circus performance skills. Other forms of gymnastics are rhythmic gymnastics, various trampolining sports and aerobic and acrobatic gymnastics.

Snow skiing is a group of sports utilizing skis as primary equipment. Skis are used in conjunction with boots that connect to the ski with use of a binding. Although snowboarding shares the general characteristics of skiing sports, it evolved from surfing and skateboarding and so is not considered a type of skiing. The posture assumed in snowboarding is a side on action whereas the skiing posture is primarily front facing.

Skiing can be grouped into two general categories. Nordic skiing is the oldest category and includes sport that evolved from skiing as done in Scandinavia. Nordic style bindings attach at the toes of the skier's boots, but not at the heels. Alpine skiing includes sports that evolved from skiing as done in the Alps. Alpine bindings attach at both the toe and the heel of the skier's boots. As with many disciplines, such as Telemark skiing, there is some crossover. However, binding style and history tend to dictate whether a style is considered Nordic or Alpine. Thus, in view of its lack of a locking heel, and its roots in Telemark, Norway, Telemark is generally considered a Nordic discipline.

Track and field athletics, commonly known as athletics or track and field, is a collection of sports events that involve running, throwing and jumping. The name "athletics" is derived from the Greek word "athlos" meaning "contest".

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal of baseball is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four markers called bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting while the other team (the fielding team) 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 hope to score on a teammate's hit. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team gets 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.

Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is popular in North America (particularly in the United States), Central America, parts of South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia. The game is thought to have originated in England some time before 1755, as noted by William Bray, a lawyer from the period whose diary historians have recently authenticatedhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/baseball/2799671/Major-League-Baseball-told-Your-sport-is-British-not-American.htmlhttp://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/baseball/mlb/09/11/baseball.england.ap/index.htmlhttp://www.surreycc.gov.uk/SCCWebsite/sccwspages.nsf/searchresults/d6edee917b44f96a802574c1005675bb?OpenDocumenthttp://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7609000/7609897.stm. The consensus of historians is that it evolved from earlier bat-and-ball games, such as cricket and rounders. Baseball was then brought to North America by British and Irish immigrants. This is contrary to the popular belief that the game was invented in North America during the eighteenth century. However, by the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball in contrast to the very similar game of softball.

In North America, professional Major League Baseball teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the champion of Major League Baseball is determined by playoffs culminating in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team. The wild card is the team with the best record among the non?division winners in the league. In the National League, the pitcher is required to bat, per the traditional rules. In the American League, there is a tenth player, a designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each major league team has a "farm system" of minor league teams at various levels. 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 five active players each try to score points against one another by propelling a ball through a 10 feet (3 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 shooting the ball through the basket above; the team with more points at the end of the game wins. The ball can be advanced on the court by bouncing it (dribbling) or passing it between teammates. Disruptive physical contact (fouls) is not permitted and there are restrictions on how the ball can be handled (violations).

Through time, basketball has developed to involve 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 have become exceedingly popular as an outdoor sport among both inner city and rural groups.

Cue sports (sometimes spelled cuesports) 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 among certain groups and geographic regions. In the United Kingdom, "billiards" refers exclusively to English billiards, while in the United States 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

* Pocket billiards (or "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 us 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, 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.

Category: Image - :Longoni-cues.jpg|thumb|124px|Cues

Cheerleading is a sport that uses organized routines made from elements of tumbling, dance, jumps and stunting to direct spectators of events to cheer on sports teams at games and matches and/or compete at cheerleading competitions. The athlete involved is called a cheerleader. With an estimated 1.5 million participants in allstar cheerleading (not including the millions more in high school, college or little league participants) in the United States alone, cheerleading is, according to Newsweeks Arian Campo-Flores, "the most quintessential of American sports." 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, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden 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 is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication (see body language) between humans or animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance), motion in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in the wind), and certain musical forms or genres. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are dance disciplines while martial arts kata are often compared to dances.

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 can and are likely to occur.

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