Curacao is a beautiful Caribbean island with a population of about 140,000, extremely limited resources, and some of the best Little League Baseball players in the world. They qualified for the Little League World Series every year from 2001-2009, winning the title in 2004, and taking second in 2005. Eleven players from Curacao have gone on to play Major League ball. Curacao is a baseball phenomenon.* To put this in perspective: 180,000 teams from 90 countries compete in Little League baseball.

Read More

Alexandr Romankov is often remembered for his ten World Championships and five Olympic medals, and is generally considered one of the greatest fencers in history. However, what is often overlooked--and, perhaps, is far more interesting--is that Romankov's early fencing career was unexceptional. He spent many years without any great success in the sport. He loved fencing, however, and had a coach that insisted that, with diligence and patience, Romankov would eventually excel, so he continued to

Read More

The arcade game boom of the 1970s and 80s was fading and interest in video games was waning when the entire industry was suddenly jolted back into relevance with the appearance of Capcom's Street Fighter II in 1991. Though the invention of the two-player fighting game is often traced back to Tim Skelly's 1979 dueling game Warrior, it wasn't until Street Fighter II appeared with its cast of playable characters, each with their own assortment of special moves, that the fighting game genre took off.

Read More

In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi writes, "In battle, if you make your opponent flinch, you have already won." This idea is at the heart of tactics in fencing. In order to control an opponent and properly frame the bout, fencers have to be able to do more than just respond to their opponents' choices. They must force their opponents to react.

Many people often think of creating a reaction as an idea that only applies to feints or second-intention actions. In fact,

Read More

In 1988, the Berkeley swim team took part in an unique experiment. Each swimmer was asked to swim one of his (or her) best events as fast as he could. Their coaches then told them that their times were slightly worse than they actually were. After a sufficient rest, the swimmers were then asked to swim again. While some of the athletes performed the same, others did much better, and others--even some of the team's stars--did far worse than they had the first time.

What makes this experiment

Read More