Gamekeeping, Field Sports and Country Pursuits

Because the standard unit of measurement in any outdoor lighting design is the footcandle, government regulations normally specify footcandle minimum requirements for parking lot lighting, and security lighting, and athletic field lighting. One sport that warrants particular attention to footcandle lighting levels is soccer. Because soccer fields have sprung up all over the country with the rising popularity of the game, it is common to find them widely varied in size and function. To effectively light a soccer field, a professional designer or DYI certified electrical installer has to take certain critical factors into consideration before purchasing soccer field lights, mounts, and poles. Sometimes even a professional designer has to consult with an electrician who is familiar with local municipal outdoor lighting codes, and sometimes a DYI in spite of local expertise has to call the US Soccer foundation for recommendations on which soccer field lighting equipment will give a given location optimal foot candle spread with minimal glare and strict regulation of light pollution.

To save a step for the contractor and to reduce the margin of error for the DIY installer, RLL Design streamlines this information into a consolidated set of expert tools and consultation services offered for free through our online forum and complimentary over the phone to serious inquirers and clients. We also inventory a complete selection of soccer field lights, equipment, and mounting accessories to optimize game visibility for players and to maintain your facility in good standing with governing compliance standards. Because so many games are played at night, player safety is foremost in consideration when developing a soccer field lighting system. To produce clear visibility without blinding glare, lighting experts must mathematically determine the precise level of foot-candles needed for the size of a particular field. They must also take into account whether or not spectators will be watching the game, as this constitutes a second layer of light that must be evenly spread over the field.

One foot candle is equal to one lumen of light spread evenly over a space of one square foot. Special equipment is required to measure footcandle levels, and normally only professional electricians have access to this equipment. This is one area where neither DIY electricians nor outdoor lighting designers relatively new to sports lighting ever want to cut corners. Municipal codes are strict in almost every part of the country, and dark sky laws now extend from coast to coast requiring athletic field lighting be kept on the field and out of neighboring homes and businesses. By taking the time to ensure your proposed system meets with all legal requirements and fulfills the recommendations of the US Soccer Foundation, you can provide your client or your own organization with an insulating factor against liabilities that could result from injuries on an improperly lighted soccer field.

Light levels on soccer fields will vary greatly depending on field size, status as a practice field or game field, and the number of spectators viewing the game. Here is where RLL Design can offer such a powerful competitive advantage when it comes to determining just what should go into a system. By doing the calculations for our clients, we help even the most advanced mathematicians double check their work, and we help DYI installers with limited time and resources save a step.

Voltage also factors heavily into determining which soccer field lights will produce ideal, glare free visibility on the field. RLL Design sports lights are regulated with sophisticated magnetic transformers that control voltage levels and produce superior electron flow. Our specialists will help you assess the needs of the field and choose from a range of multi-tap ballasts ranging from 120, 208, 240, and 277 volts. Contractors installing lights in professional soccer stadiums can also obtain 480-volt ballasts for game and spectator lighting. Stadiums of this size normally require as much as 75 footcandles of continuous, horizontal target illumination, compared to the mere 30 footcandles required by a local municipal or schoolyard practice field.

If you are a contractor, working with a vendor like RLLD who can supply you with lights for either scenario gives you a strong competitive advantage over other firms who may only have access to fixtures appropriate for a certain sized field only.

Regardless of your level of expertise, it is always a good idea to call an RLL Design specialist to ensure your voltage calculations have correctly matched your lamp type to your ballast. Incorrect estimates can create hazards and consume more power than necessary. However, when properly ballasted and fitted on the correctly sized poles, RLL Design soccer field lights will produce a more efficient light than cheaper, competing equivalents. Advanced reflector arrays help the metal halide lamps within the fixtures spread the light more evenly across the field and simultaneously prevent excess spill light from creating light pollution and glare. This makes the game more enjoyable to watch, more safe to play, and eliminates complaints from neighboring businesses and homeowners.

RLL Design, in keeping with recommendations made by the US Soccer Foundation, recommends you use galvanized steel poles to mount your soccer field lights. These poles are more resistant to strong winds and will last longer, protecting investment dollars from replacement costs. To help contractors and DYI installers place their lighting fixtures at the precise, necessary height, RLL Design stocks a full repertoire of mounting assemblies to accommodate effective illumination of any size field from the recommended distances from sidelines and fences.

RLL Design specialists will help both professionals and end users research regulatory codes, make all necessary calculations to determine optimal lighting levels, and supply all fixtures, poles, mounts, and accessories needed to fully light a soccer field of any size, anywhere in the United States.

Though not always flying under the banner of ‘hypnosis’, these days almost all top level sports men and women – and the elite mental coaches who work with them – use some form of hypnosis to aid them in performing at their very best.

Through its unique ability to harness the power of the subconscious mind, hypnosis is able to assist the sports person in achieving some really amazing results.

In the world of modern competitive sports, where national pride and huge sums of money are often at stake, it just makes sense that the sports person is able to utilise every legal means in order to obtain real results.

Indeed, hypnosis has a very long history in connection with sports of all kinds.

For years, the Soviet Olympic team used it in order to give them the edge, and because of their success, it didn’t take long for other teams to rapidly incorporate hypnosis into their own elite athlete training with impressive results.

Nowhere are results more important than in the field of competitive sports. Any strategy or approach that fails to produce champion results is quickly discarded, while those that do show themselves to have real value are rapidly incorporated into training.

The list of positive advantages that sports men and women gain from incorporating hypnosis into their training is varied and long. Benefits include enabling the athlete to remain calm under pressure, maintain focus and eliminate distractions, improve mental stamina and increase endurance, ease pre-competition nerves, as well as improve the athlete’s attitude and motivation.

Very often, the athlete or mental coach uses words such as ‘entering the zone’ or ‘creative visualization’. In essence, what this means is that the sports person is able to access and work directly with their subconscious — that driver of abilities and the powerhouse of beliefs, in order to properly program it for accomplishment and success.

Since he was very young, champion golfer Tiger Woods, for example, has used hypnosis on a regular basis. His mental coach and family friend, Jay Brunza introduced the golfer to this powerful tool when Woods was just thirteen years old.

States Woods: ‘We worked on a way to visualize the target and pull it back into my hands and body and let my subconscious react. That’s what’s best for me.’ So successful was this strategy that: ‘It is inherent in what I do now’, states Woods.

In the UK, WBC Heavyweight Champion Frank Bruno and WBC Super Middleweight Champion Nigel Benn both employed hypnosis in order to perform at their peak.

In his 1996 WBO Super Middleweight title fight, Chris Eubank was defeated by Steve Collins who attributed much of the victory to the fact that he had used hypnosis in his mental preparation for the fight.

Collins had worked with former champion bodybuilder Tony Quinn and was hypnotically programmed to deliver two punches for every one thrown by his competitor. In the fight, Eubank threw 300 punches, compared to over 600 from Collins.

But you don’t need to be a professional athlete or sportsperson in order to harness the wonderful power of hypnosis. You too can learn to use it to enhance your game, allowing you to fully enjoy yourself and the results you get from your sporting hobby.

If you want to be at the top of your game, it makes sense to seek out a properly qualified hypnotherapist, someone who has both interest in and experience of working in the field of sports hypnosis.

Do that and you too can put yourself into ‘the zone’ and become even more of a winner!

Abstract

In this article the problem of sport management is discussed. Firstly, a brief definition to the notion of Sport management is given followed by an excurse to history. Than the background and origin of sport management is discussed the second part of the article is dedicated to the current situation and prospects of sport management. A special attention is paid to the educational sphere and career opportunities that potential employees may have in the field of sport management. Finally, the article is concluded by prospects of sport management.

Introduction

Sport management existed for quite a long period of time and it always accompanied sport as its essential part. Naturally, it had different forms and differed from the notion of sport management as it is defined nowadays but such activity is known from ancient times. At least ancient Greeks practiced such an activity and probably they may be called one of the founders of sport management. This fact proves the importance of sport and sport management for people of all times. It was and it remains to be as important for people as their health sine sport provides health for people and sport management provides effectiveness of sport for all its participants. Nowadays sport management becomes more and more important because as many other things in the modern world sport is business and consequently it needs effective management that, in its turn, demands the preparation of well-qualified specialists in this domain. At the same time sport management is not only business. As sport so sport management are social phenomena for it involves not only professionals, for whom sport is their main source of earnings and actually it is their life, but also there is a huge category of amateurs, for whom sport is just a hobby but they still need sport management to practice sport as effectively as possible. So, taking into consideration the role of sport and sport management in the modern world, I would like to discuss this phenomenon in my article and focus my attention on the notion of sport management itself, its history, and prospects for all those who either on their way or already work in this field.

The Notion and Role of Sport Management

First of all, it is necessary to start with the definition of sport management. In order to understand any phenomenon, we have to know what is implied by its definition and interpret it correspondingly. Speaking about sport management, it is possible to say that there may be different interpretation of this notion but the main point of all definitions remains practically the same, in other words it may change its form but its content, its basic principles remain the same.

On analyzing different points of view on sport management, it is possible to make a general conclusion and give certain conclusion what it actually is. On doing this, I would prefer to define sport management as follows: “Sport management is a goal-oriented social process within a sport enterprise using pragmatic self-determined goals involving the selection of appropriate strategies and provisions for directing the work of the sport enterprise, and the control of performance in an effort to meet the objectives of the organization.” (Parkhouse 1996:47). Such a definition provides probably the best description of sport management and its main characteristics which permit to understand the essence of this phenomenon.

Naturally, there may be different view on sport management but it is obvious that any sport organization have to have its goals to achieve. The latter may be done only with the help of sport management that can organize all the staff of the sport enterprise and mobilize all its forces for achievement its goals. At the same time, simply to organize the work of a sport organization is not enough. It is necessary to control the fulfillment of the main tasks each department or even each person within the organization has to do.

But such a definition helps to realize what sport management is at large. At the same time it is necessary to take into consideration the position of those people who work in this field and for all those people who are currently working or are going to work in this sphere sport management is not just a profession it is rather a set of different professions, basically of administrative character which provide a person’s ability to fulfill his or her duties as a sport manager.

Obviously, management remains management even in such a specific domain as sport, particularly if we speak about professional sport which nowadays is more than sport. It is a great business and it is enough to have a look at such monstrous sport associations in North America as NHL, or NBA, for instance, it will be evident what kind of business it is and how profitable it may be, naturally on the condition if the management is effective, well planned and the execution of the main tasks is thoroughly controlled. At the same time we should remember that sport or any sport organization is more than a commercial enterprise it is also a social phenomenon since very often sport plays very important role in the life of certain groups of people or even whole countries. For instance, in the ancient world, namely in Greece, any wars were forbidden during the period of the Olympic games. So the organization of the Olympic games played a significant peacemaking and consolidating role in the ancient Greek society.

Unfortunately, nowadays we can hardly find an example like this but still sport remains very important for any human society and proper organization of sport events as well as effective functioning of numerous sport enterprises remains extremely significant for people in any country in the world.

Sport Management: Education and Career Opportunities

Taking into consideration the role sport and consequently sport management play in the modern world, we can presuppose that sport organizations need a great number of well-qualified specialists that could be provided only by professional education of such specialists on the highest level. The current situation actually proves that the growing demand engenders the growing offer of sport management education which matches the basic demands to specialists in this field. But it is necessary to point out that such a trend has appeared recently, within the last fifty-sixty years.