Mixed Zone blog

The host of "Good Game with Sarah Spain" (and Great Game Lab fellow... she's good and great, folks) Sarah Spain had quite the time covering her first Olympic Games in Italy, where women’s sports media also became a newsworthy protagonist. In this Q&A version of a Scouting Report, Sarah answered the Great Game Lab’s most pressing and hard-hitting journalistic questions, like what was it like to sing with Flavor Flav and which pin was she most excited to trade for.

Once again, the small country of Norway won the medal count at the Winter Olympic Games, beating sporting giants like the United States, Germany, France and China. Andrei Markovits and Christian Neubacher explain the Nordic country's winter sporting dominance and why we should fully expect Norway’s prowess to continue unabated in future Games.

How many of the 230 hockey players in the Milano Cortina Olympic women's tournament do you think have spent time developing their world-class skills in American college sports? Shelby Evans brings the stats and the history behind how U.S. college women's hockey became a globalized league and the best place for athletes around the world to advance their game and make their national teams.

As a child in India, Narayanappa Janardhan’s parents dissuaded him from playing or following some of the nation’s traditional sports. Unlike tennis, they did not consider them a worthy pursuit for upwardly mobile professionals. But now, as Dr. Janardhan explains in his VAR, these traditional sports are now becoming celebrated upwardly mobile businesses, thanks to media, and he is eagerly following them.

The Valley of the Sun isn’t exactly known for snow, but that hasn’t stopped the Great Game Lab from getting excited about the Winter Olympics. With Milano Cortina 2026 around the corner, we took a walk around campus to check the temperature on Olympic excitement.

 

If you are looking forward to the Australian Open as much as I am, chances are you will enjoy the first full season of The Players Box podcast as much as I will.

Running is a shapeshifter. It serves us in different and overlapping ways as we move through our lives and choose to move by running. Running is forever profound in this way. At the same time, as Nicholas Thompson points out in the new memoir, The Running Ground, running is “the simplest of sports.”

The Great Game Lab is primed for FIFA's World Cup draw to be held in Washington on December 5. We walked about our Arizona State campus to gauge how primed the rest of our community is.

Our latest Scrimmage explores baseball diplomacy between the U.S. and Japan after an exceptional performance by the L.A. Dodgers in the World Series. Jason Coskrey of The Japan Times, Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, and Professor Derek Moscato of Western Washington University, weigh in on what this means for the 150-year-long relationship between the two nations.

The most globalized sports league on earth deserves a companion podcast with a global audience that is as funny, smart, and kind-hearted as your favorite relative at the Thanksgiving table. The English Premier League is fortunate one such podcast exists: The Guardian’s Football Weekly.

Great Game Lab Co-Director Andrés Martinez spent a week in Poland giving talks at universities and meeting with various sports teams and organizations on a visit organized by the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. The trip reminded him, as he reflects in this VAR, of how sport is increasingly binding people across borders, even when politics and other forces may not always do so, and how it also binds people across time, generations, and political eras. Martinez was left mightily impressed by Poland, an astonishing success story of the past few decades.

Philadelphia sports fans have long carried a reputation for being intense, passionate — and sometimes aggressive. So when Great Game Lab Documentarian Yana Pashaeva arrived at the Philadelphia Union’s final home game of the MLS regular season, she wasn’t sure what to expect.