Football 2016: a sideline full of 10 new books

Those who like to huddle over a good football read have quite a roster to choose from this fall.

8. 'You Negotiate Like a Girl: Reflections on My Career in the National Football League,’ by Amy Trask with Mike Freeman

The Oakland Raiders have long had a reputation as a maverick organization, an anti-establishment team in the male-dominated, conformist National Football League. Even so, it’s surprising that a woman, Amy Trask, rose as high as she did in the front office, all the way to CEO, making her the league’s highest-ranking female executive. It all started when she was a law school student and she made a cold call to the Raiders, who were then based in Los Angeles. She landed a job as an intern. In her book, she tells about working her way up through the ranks, dealing with some of the biggest personalities in the game (including team owner Al Davis), and what attending league meetings is like. Today Trask is an analyst for CBS Sports and the CBS Sports Network.  

Here’s an excerpt from You Negotiate Like a Girl:

“One of the things I love about football is that it is highly cerebral. The first time I saw a game, I decided it was like a game of chess, played by very large, very strong, and very fast men. It is game of matches in which one must find ways to exploit the weaknesses of an opponent while camouflaging, to the extent possible, the weaknesses of one’s own team. How do our backs match up against your linebackers? How does our offensive line match up against your defensive line? Do we need to send extra men? Do we need to keep extra men in to block? Can our corners cover your receivers man to man? Should we play zone?

“The best coaches exploit matches and hide deficiencies to prevent other coaches from doing so. The best coaches maximize the talent on their roster. The worst coaches insist on forcing players into their system, irrespective of whether the players are suited for it. It never ceases to amaze me when coaches do that."

8 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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