A three-hour car ride home from a lacrosse tournament doesn’t sound all that bad. However, a three-hour car ride home from a lacrosse tournament with a pile of stinky, sweaty gear in the back of the car may make you think twice about going on that road trip.

This is exactly what happened to the mother of three sports-loving children, Krista Wood, while on her way back from her son’s tournament one evening. With their son fast asleep in the back of the car, husband and wife duo Krista and Chris were left stuck with the unpleasant stench nearly 150 miles away from their final destination.

Coming up with a solution for stinky sports equipment seemed hopeless for Wood. A lot of sports gear is not washable and it’s certainly too expensive to replace every time it gets soaked in sweat. After having tried nearly every spray on the market to rid her son’s lacrosse equipment of the stench, Wood was left feeling defeated with no solution in sight.

But she was determined to conquer the odor. After doing some research on what causes bad odor, she and her husband got to work developing a prototype in their garage. After nearly a year of fine-tuning their product, the Woods family invented the first pair of Glovestix, a now popular sports accessory meant to stop bad odor in its tracks.

Using two perforated plastic tubes lined with silver to kill odor-causing bacteria, the husband and wife team discovered the solution they were so desperately in search of. Today, the inventors have expanded on their original idea to include an entire line of odor-killing “stix” intended for items such as boots, skates, helmets, gloves, and even ballet slippers.

After appearing on NBC’s Today and QVC, the Woods family quickly sold out of GloveStix when they received 5,000 orders …2,000 orders over their initial goal! The duo is still inventing, currently working on different iterations of their original Glovestix.

*Davison had no involvement with the design of the featured product

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With the 68^th season of the National Basketball Association (NBA) underway, we thought that we would take a look at the history of basketball, dating all the way back to its humble beginnings in Massachusetts.

There are some people who enjoy the winter, while others find it to be nothing but a nuisance. James Naismith was one of those people who found winter to be nothing more than a hindrance to his athletic endeavors.  He found that the winter kept him from playing outdoors, which resulted in weight gain and loss of strength.

Naismith was born in the Ontario village of Almonte and made the move to Massachusetts to escape those long Ontario winter months. Even though winters are long and cold in Massachusetts, it was a definite improvement from Ontario.

As time progressed, Naismith became a physical education teacher at a small Christian college. Since he knew that winter in New England wasn’t much better than the winter in Ontario, he decided to look for a bright side.  This opportunity arose at the school where he was teaching.  There was an assembly hall with moveable benches and a hardwood floor that would eventually become the birthplace of his invention.

The blueprint for the game that we know today was designed during this time. Naismith created a game that was well-suited to the room’s high ceiling and rectangular floor plan. The original game combined characteristics of soccer, football and baseball, all of which supported and placed an emphasis on teamwork and friendly competition.

So, how were the sports previously listed infused in the original blueprint of the game? For starters, the ball that was used at the time was a regulation soccer ball that, instead of being kicked, was bounced or passed by hand, much like a football or baseball, from one end of the room to the other and was thrown into a peach basket that was hung at either end, thus giving birth to its name: basketball.

Originally, basketball was played with nine members on each team. The idea of the game quickly spread throughout New England and eventually throughout the United States. By 1896, there were enough colleges that had formed their own basketball teams that the first extramural competition was held, but instead of nine players, each team had five.

Two years later, the first professional basketball league was created. Within the next few years, with Naismith’s approval, new rules were implemented to ensure that the game would be played in a friendly-competitive spirit. Among the new rules, the most important were those that defined what a foul or penalty was and gave the person that was fouled the opportunity to take possession of the ball or the chance to throw the ball without opposition. Additional rules included those that would help the speed of the game by incorporating a clock and not basing the game solely on the accumulation of points.

Here is a little fun fact: did you know that when the game of basketball was first played, players could only shoot the ball with two hands? It wasn’t until decades later that the rules allowed for players to shoot the ball with one hand. Could you imagine if this rule hadn’t been instituted and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s classic hook shot never existed? We couldn’t either!

Innovation went hand-in-hand with the invention of the sport. For instance, the addition of nets to the basket allowed for the ball to fall through and be retrieved on the court rather than a referee or player having to climb a ladder in order to retrieve the ball from the wooden basket.

Other innovations included adding a backboard to the basket, which was added to keep fans of the defending team from interfering with the opposing team’s shot or, in 1901, allowing players to bounce the ball once; before that time, players couldn’t dribble the ball at all!

All of these additions and more gradually improved the game in its early stages and slowly became pieces of the puzzle of the sport that we know today. Now, basketball has become popular not only in America, but also around the world, attracting the most talented athletes as well as offering entertainment to fans and competition to players. From its humble beginnings in Massachusetts, the game of basketball that was invented by James Naismith back in 1891 continues to thrive from its inception of using nothing more than a soccer ball and peach basket.

Copyright Davison 2013

Sources:

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2013/04/history-basketball-time-final/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basketball

Media:

http://www.nba.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/1111/james-naismith/content.1.html

http://ionenewsone.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/kareem-abdul-jabbar.jpg

http://www.tucsonhoops.com/resources/history-classroom/basketball-origins

The post A Shot at History: Basketball appeared first on Davison.

Moats

Lusail Iconic Stadium is a proposed football stadium that will be built in Lusail, Qatar, in time for the opening and final games of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Like the other stadiums planned for the 2022 World Cup, the Lusail Stadium will be cooled using solar power and have a zero carbon footprint. The stadium was designed by the British firm, Foster + Partners. It will have an almost circular base, surrounded by a moat and connected to the car park by six bridges.

Rectangles

The Arena Corinthians in São Paulo, Brazil, is the future home ground of Sport Club Corinthians Paulista. When this arena is completed, it will be the fifth-largest stadium on the top tier of the Brazilian League and the eleventh-largest in Brazil, with a seating capacity of 48,000. The stadium will host six 2014 FIFA World Cup matches, including the opening match. Due to the request of at least 65,000 seats for the World Cup opening match, temporary seats will be added to the stadium for the tournament.

Morphing

Incheon Asiad Main Stadium is a planned multi-use stadium in Incheon, South Korea. Once completed in 2014, it will be used mostly for athletic meets and will be the main host of the 2014 Asian Games. The stadium has been designed with an initial capacity of 60,000 spectators. After the 2014 Asian Games, capacity will be reduced to 30,000 spectators.

Sustainability

The New Levi’s stadium in Santa Clara, California, incorporates photovoltaic panels, a green roof, excellent public transit access, convenient bicycle parking, walking path access from the San Tomas Creek Trail, water-conserving plumbing fixtures, sophisticated building control systems, recycled materials and a long list of other sustainable design concepts.

Luxury

Grand Stade de Casablanca is a proposed title of the planned football stadium to be built in Casablanca, Morocco. Once completed in 2014, it will be used mostly for football matches and will serve as the home of Raja Casablanca, Wydad Casablanca and Moroccan National Football Team. The stadium was designed with a capacity of 80,000 spectators, making it one of the highest capacity stadiums in Africa. Once completed, it will replace Stade Mohamed V.

Copyright Davison 2013

Images:

http://cityscapes.ma/vb/showthread.php/8267-Grand-Stade-de-Casablanca

http://www.ninersnation.com/2013/5/8/4312282/49ers-stadium-naming-rights-levis

http://www.saopaulo-sp.net/arena-corinthians.htm

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1230235&page=2

https://www.tuvie.com/incheon-main-stadium-for-2014-asian-games/

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_Corinthians

http://newsantaclarastadium.com/about#/features

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The origins of golf are unclear and hotly debated. Many golf historians say that golf began in Scotland.  Others say that the Dutch started golf as a game played with a stick and ball on frozen canals in the wintertime. Still others say that golf has been played in China since the Southern Tang Dynasty, 500 years before the Scots ever picked up a club. But, while ‘stick and ball’ games have been around for many centuries, the game as we know it, played over 18 holes is generally considered to be a Scottish invention. The first documented mention of golf in Scotland appears in a 1457 Act of the Scottish Parliament, an edict issued by King James II of Scotland prohibiting the playing of “gouf” as it distracted soldiers from their archery practice. The word golf—or as they say in Scotland: “gouf”—derives from the Dutch word “kolf”, which means, quite simply, club.

But modern golf really began in 1744, when the oldest surviving rules of golf were written for The Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers and formed the basis for all subsequent codes. But it took another one hundred years before the game spread outside of Scotland. In the 1850s, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. Their frequent visits and royal enthusiasm for Scotland and golf caused a boom in tourism, and a wider interest in Scottish culture and golf. By the late 1800s, golf had spread throughout Britain and Europe;,and then landed firmly in America. In 1894, several American golf clubs met in New York City to form what was to become the United States Golf Association (USGA).

Since then, the biggest evolution in the game has been in equipment. Some of the biggest advancements have been in the development of the golf ball. Wooden balls, hand-carved from hardwood, were the first golf balls, and were used between the 14th and 17th centuries. These balls were replaced by the feathery ball, a hand-sewn round leather pouch stuffed with chicken or goose feathers and coated with paint. Despite these leather pouches’ obvious drawbacks, the feathery was still a dramatic improvement over the wooden ball, and remained the standard golf ball well into the 19th century.

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Fast, Fresh Food

Ordering pizza has never been so fresh. The Pizza Keeper keeps your leftover pizza fresh and ready to reheat, so you have much more time to concentrate on the things you need to do. Pizza Keeper is a neat, convenient way to store leftover pizza compactly in the refrigerator. The air-tight container has a second tier and a separator, so one unit can hold four large slices of pizza neatly and easily. The product also can be used to microwave all the slices at once, making reheating as easy as three, two, one, beep.

Study Storage

Despite the pervasiveness of electronic media, highlighters, pencils and pens will be part of college life as long as you’re paying $200 a pop for that Intro to Philosophy text book. Save time by keeping your study accessories organized with Davison’s Magna Jars. Davison’s team of designers created a small jar that has a magnetic lid and can hold up to a pound of pens, highlighters and various other study materials. The powerful one-way magnet embedded in the jar lid makes it easy to attach the set of four jars to metal cabinetry and other metal objects.

Rooting Rack

You don’t need to mess around when it’s time to suit up and root for the alma mater, and with college teams spanning sports from chess team to NCAA football, you are going to need a variety of hats. Davison will help you keep those hats organized. Cap Racks mount to most doors and walls and are perfect for organizing, storing and protecting hats, as well as belts and bags.

Pamper Products

At school, you’re on your feet a lot. Between hustling to class and squeezing in that lunch-hour Zumba class, your feet and knees take a beating. Pamper yourself during your downtime with the TheraPED, a wearable product that offers moist heat as well as cooling therapy to soothe sore feet and toes. Or, soothe your knee pain with the Hot/Cold Therapy Brace.

Transitioning from summer vacations to midterm cram sessions can be a difficult task. Let these Davison products make the transition a little smoother.

A typical project does not get a royalty agreement, sell in stores or generate a profit.

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