The Third Annual Winter Film Festival: Cold Rush

Edgework: Let’s get serious about snow. Here’s a great film, sponsored by Red Bull ( a company that likes living and sports on the edge) about doing it right in the white.  Best way to view it? Kick to the flat screen; run the sound through your hi-fi, and dig in. Have it. Perfect for a cold winter night. The thing you want to do on a sunny winter day.
 
The Fine Print: Embed courtesy  of YouTube (thanks guys ) and Red Bull (who produced). All rights belong to their respective owners. Thank you, to everyone, for sharing. 
 
 

2015: One Year in Photos From The White House

Photo by Pete Souza, Official White House Photographer. What a great shot!!
Photo by Pete Souza, Official White House Photographer. What a great shot!!

Press Clippings: Pete Souza is the official White House Photographer. Every year he selects the best of the the thousands of photos he produces and combines them into an amazing exhibit that encompasses in visuals all that happened at the most famous House in America. A selection of 2015’s best comes to us courtesy of Business Insider. Take a look back at the year that was on a day when the President of the United States delivers his final State of the Union Address (9PM Eastern).

The Third Annual Winter Film Festival: How to Stay Safe Skiing the Backcountry

Edgework: If you ski, sooner or later you’re going to want to break away from the carefully groomed slopes at major ski resorts and and try your skill and luck in the backcountry(also called off piste skiing). You can do this by going down the backside of the mountain (instead of the front) when you get to the top of the lift, by taking  snow cat into the backcountry, by ski mountaineering up and then skiing down or via helicopter. It is the ultimate skiing experience and the more you ski, the more backcountry skiing is the only kind of skiing you want to do. It’s exhilarating, technical, demanding, and inherently dangerous. Avalanches are a constant concern…but…danger seems to go with lots of the things we like, from big-wave surfing to driving at triple digit speeds through the mountains.  Plus/minus, yin/yang, in/out…it’s the balance of life. I am not going to try, ever, to talk you out of pursuing sports that have an element of danger in them; I will always try to convince you to be extravagantly prepared for a tough situation when it comes, in every possible way: training, conditioning, gear, experience, and….guides.
With this post, we start the third year of our annual Winter Film Festival. Last year, the emphasis was on pure alpine skiing, racing,  and technique, and while there will be plenty of that this year, the focus is shifting to backcountry skiing, helicopter skiing, ski mountaineering…the very edges of the sport. Let’s start with the basics: how to be safe in the backcountry. Here’s a great video from H2OOverdrive  featuring Trent Meisheimer of the Utah Avalanche Center (and some very experienced friends) to make you critically aware of backcountry safety. Take chances. Have fun. Challenge yourself. But put the odds on your side…
 
The Fine Print: Embed courtesy of YouTube (thanks guys..and Happy New Year). From H2OOverdrive/Hydrate Channel. First published 20 March 2012. Check out their channel. All rights reserved by respective rights holders. Ski hard. Ski safe.

The Statement

Chip Kelly with Eagles QB Sam Bradford, October, 2015. Photo by Keith Allison (Thanks Keith).
Chip Kelly with Eagles QB Sam Bradford, October, 2015. Photo by Keith Allison (Thanks Keith).

Press Clippings: Chip Kelly, the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles professional football team was rather unceremoniously fired last week by team owner Jeffrey Lurie.
Kelly had a 26-21 record with the Eagles in his three seasons; he made the playoffs his first year as the Eagles head coach and did not make them for the last two years. This year, the Eagles went  6-9 with one game left as this was written.
 
I will leave it to the pro football pundits, wizards, and commentators to debate whether or not Chip Kelly was a great coach who was let go too soon or someone who should have been booted a lot sooner. Start with Peter King of Sports Illustrated’s very fine piece  and you’ll have sufficient background to make your own judgement on Kelly’s football accomplishments.
 
Forget about the football aspects to see the real story.
Look at the way the firing took place to get the real significance. Coaches are fired every season, in every sport, professional, amateur, or collegiate. That’s no big deal. As the late, great, Houston Oilers football coach Bum Phillips once said, “There’s only two kinds of coaches: those who’ve been fired and those who are gonna be fired”. Kelly is now one of the former, but before last week, he was one of the latter.
 
Jeff Lurie is a very patient owner and he obviously ran out of patience with Chip Kelly. But it was obviously something more—maybe Kelly’s attitude or resistance to listening to what the owner wanted or demands for more power–that flipped Lurie’s switch.  Whatever, it broke the barrier for the owner. The ground rules in pro sports are simple: coaches work for owners and owners get their way. No matter how big the ego of the coach, it had best be smaller than that of the owner. No matter how smart the coach thinks he is, the owner is smarter—after all, the owner found/made/assembled the $100 million (or much, much more) it takes to buy a team, put in the infrastructure, and get the organization up and running. Owners stick around for a long, long, time. Coaches for not so long.
Chip Kelly didn’t get fired because he had a losing season; he got booted because something he did really, really, pist off an owner with a reputation for patience and an open mind (after all…he brought Kelly and his high octane/fast-play offense into the NFL).
But the firing wasn’t the real point. Lurie made a statement when he let Kelly go.
The firing was timed to hit the media hard on one of the biggest weekends of the year in college and pro football.
It came before the end of the season, when such things are expected—when a firing takes place in season, it’s a signal that things are really, really bad. It was out of the normal sequence of such things.
And in this case bad enough to not go on for even one more game.
There will be no quiet day in the office for Kelly to clean things out; if he goes into the Eagles facility now, it’s a bit of a walk of shame.
And, the timing of the timing of the dismissal also means that Kelly was taken out of consideration for all of the big college coaching positions that were became available at the end of the 2015 Collegiate season. Intentional? Or Not? The timing was the exclamation point on the situation.
Jeff Lurie made a statement when he fired Chip Kelly.
It was brutal, forceful, impactful.
And simple: even the most accomplished of coaches have to answer to the owner for their actions. Those who are only moderately accomplished, have an even higher standard of conduct required.
Or else.
 
The Fine Print: Photo via Flickr. Photographer: Keith Allison. Shot on 4 October 2015. Used Under Creative Commons License. All rights belong to respective rights holder. (Thanks, Keith, for Sharing.)