The Leisure Review: May 2013

May 2013: news, editorial and comment

This sporting life
The Leisure Review editorial
How to take the measure of a man or define the culture of a nation? Sport can do it but only when people do not define themselves as anything other than people who are doing their best for something they love.

Row Z
The Leisure Review diary
Edition 76. Even with the sun out there is no letting up on the splenetic evacuation from Sideliner's Olivetti. In this issue: there be Lions and Dragons; letters after your name (POA); beer (IPA); England's kickball coaching roster (ESQ); new angles on active transport (OBE); and devilish dining (YST).

News in Brief
Edition 72. Partings and greetings, hirings and imagination-firing, swimming and online campaigning. The section of The Leisure Review that actually adheres to its remit.

World of Leisure: cultural news daily
A day-by-day account of how sport, leisure and culture appears in the national press. Now with added March.

The leisure manager's library
With Hollywood looking again at Fitzgerald, The Leisure Review's guide to literature revisits The Great Gatsby, said by some to be the greatest novel ever written. But what's it got to do with leisure?

The letters page
The Leisure Review letters page: a single-handed attempt to reintroduce the editorial process into an online world. And to add to the excitement some new correspondence.

features

Getting Britain cycling: a golden age of active transport
Jonathan Ives wonders whether the All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group’s Get Britain Cycling will prove to be a tipping point or too big an opportunity for politicians to comprehend.

Legacy is not just about the Olympics
The aim of the North West Physical Activity Forum’s (NWPAF) conference this year was to take the bones out of the Olympic legacy from a health perspective. Chair Rob Woollen tells us what he learned.

Making stately progress in Staffs
What with an early Easter and a late spring, the keepers of countryside attractions will have welcomed recent breaks in the weather. Mick Owen went for a nice day out in the country and drew some surprising inferences.

Builded here: a paean to the church hall
Bathed in ignorance and blinded to the obvious, Jonathan Ives has only recently discovered the joys of the UK’s greatest indoor leisure resource. Let’s hear it for the church hall.

Looking for a new Eady: a text book review
In 1993 John Eady wrote the book that defined sports development. Twenty years on Mick Owen reviews a new text, Strategic Sports Development, to see if the old curmudgeon can finally step aside.

Transcending incidentals: key issues for corporate social media
Michael Cassop Thompson offers an introduction to a corporate understanding of social media, pointing out some flawed assumptions and a few suggestions along the way.

recent features from The Leisure Review

Schools of thought: the sector’s response to Gove 2013
Michael Gove’s much-anticipated announcement about school sport brought out the worst in the sport system. Mick Owen reviews the responses, shaking head as he does so.

Why competition is not a 'C' word
Much to Mr Gove's probable chagrin, coachings long-established and highly effective C-system does not include 'competition'. David Haskins explains why it is not on the list.

Are you inspired yet?
With every sporting agency attaching the word ‘inspiration’ to events, activity programmes and marketing campaigns The Leisure Review convened a Coaching Insight to see what the word means to coaches in the post-Olympic landscape.

Time to drop the sat nav
With the unprecedented reorganisation of the NHS now taking place, Carl Bennett challenges the sport, leisure and culture sector to accept the realities of the new health environment and start making plans to find their way through a new funding landscape.

It was not about the bike
David Walsh spent more than a decade exposing Lance Armstrong as a liar, a bully and a cheat.
The Leisure Review went to hear him talk about the book that tells the story, Seven Deadly Sins.

Four minutes to fitness
The four-minute intensive exercise regime is back in the news but Jonathan Ives wonders whether it serves to highlight the failure of leisure to address one of the most important societal issues of our age.

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