2014 World Cup Host In Disarray

                With the 2014 World Cup around the corner, host country is Brazil is far behind schedule. Brazil is behind in the creation of all infrastructures for the event, and also FIFA is not seeing eye to eye with the Brazilian government. It took over 2 years for the Brazilian Congress to pass a law that will allow students and senior citizens to purchase event tickets at a discounted rate. FIFA’s secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, publicly said Brazil needed a "kick up the backside", as a way to speed up procedures in Brazil. He also quietly made publicly aware that there is a clause in the contract to host the World Cup which allows FIFA to withdraw the event at any point up through July of this year. 

                There have been accusations of the Brazilian government questioning the use, and possible embezzlement, of the 10 billion Euro of public money made available for the preparation of the World Cup. All of these allegations would be less severe if the national team of Brazil was in championship state. Looking forward, Brazil is not expected to have a team that will compete the way Brazil has for years. Brazil has 5 World Cup titles, which is the most in the world with the most recent title coming in 2002 in Korea/Japan. Brazil has 10 top 4 finishes, which is second in the world behind Germany (12). 

A newspaper based out of Brazil expressed criticism when the World Cup was assigned to Brazil back in October of 2007. In the O Globo was written, “"The Cup is ours. Now we only need airports, roads, hotels …".

[There are many different news articles around the intranet regarding this issue, here is one]

Collegiate Athletic Gambling

A very common problem today is collegiate sports gambling. The US government recently deemed all websites that offered online gambling to be illegal. Any website with a .com that was used for gambling has been shut down. This includes poker sites, online sportsbook, and online casinos. Gambling is legal in Oregon and Nevada. Gambling on collegiate or amateur sports is permitted only in Nevada, where it is estimated that $2.5 billion is annually wagered on college sports, $197 million of which is attributed to bets surrounding the NCAA’s Division I men’s basketball tournament. Sportsbook.com was a very popular site that offered it all. Instead of shutting down and foregoing their opportunity to continue to make billions of dollars, they have redirected their website to sportsbook.ag which means the website is primarily used from Antigua and Barbuda. This does not stop the American consumers, because the website is just as accessible.  In fact, if you type in the web address sportsbook.com it immediately redirects you to sportsbook.ag. Many bank institutions in the US have restricted debit card transactions purchased outside the US. Many of the banks now require you to inform them that you will be traveling out of the country in order for the transaction to be approved.

             

 The NCAA has a multi-tiered, federated governance structure with more than 125 committees, both association-wide and division-specific. Committees are responsible for addressing a variety of issues ranging from eligibility requirements, drug-testing policies and procedures, recruiting rules and other competitive health and safety rules including a firm stance against sports gambling (also referred to as sports wagering or gaming). This definition includes the free NCAA March Madness bracket that Yahoo!, ESPN, and CBS Sports offer. All collegiate athletes and staff are forbidden to participate in the annual March Madness challenge. There have been a number of gambling scandals at colleges around the US since 1945.

Brooklyn College (1945)
 New York City Sports Wagering (1951)
University of Kentucky (1952)
The 1961 Scandals
Boston College (1978)
Tulane University (1985)
Universities of Florida and Arkansas (1989)
Maine (1992)
Northwestern University (1994–1998)
University of Maryland (1995)
Boston College (1996)
Arizona State University (1997)
University of Florida (2001)
Florida State University (2003)
Ohio University (2007)
University of Toledo (2007)

The full-text of this article can be found, HERE.

Role of Father in Leisure Development

A recent study that was just released in Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal was examining the relationship between fathers’ involvement in family leisure and aspects of family functioning from both a father and young adolescent perspective. The sample consisted of fathers and their adolescent child from 647 families throughout the US. Results showed that there were significantly different relationships between father involvement in both core and balance family leisure with family cohesion, family adaptability, and overall family functioning. “Satisfaction with core family leisure that included the father's involvement was the single strongest predictor of all aspects of family functioning from both perspectives highlighting the importance of regularly occurring home-based family activities such as eating dinner together, participating in hobbies and informal sports or yard activities together, watching television together, or playing board games and video games together.”

This is not surprising to me at all, because when I think back at all of the leisure activities my father had us do as a family, they always brought us together as a family. Every single one of the activities listed in the study, are leisure activities that are still important to me today, and also ones that I will carry onto my family when I get older. Also, according to a number of previous studies, couples that participate in joint leisure are more satisfied with their relationship, then couples that participate in their own leisure. This does not surprise me either, because in a relationship there is so much time people are away from each other, most of it being work. If couples have the opportunity for leisure activities, they should absolutely participate in joint leisure to increase their bond between each other. This study goes in depth into many different facets of family leisure, functioning leisure, family functioning, and father involvement, and can be found at the link below:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01490400.2012.652510