New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning (pictured left) and Zimbabwean swimmer Kirsty Coventry (pictured below) were named the Academy’s Male and Female Athletes of the Month for February.

Manning completed 19 of 34 passes for 255 yards and two touchdowns as the Giants beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. He was named the Super Bowl MVP, just one year after his older brother, Peyton, claimed the same honor. Eli threw two fourth-quarter touchdowns, including the game winner in the final seconds.

The 24-year-old Coventry broke the second oldest record in swimming (16 years) when she swam the 200-meter backstroke in a world-record time of 2:06.39 at the Missouri Grand Prix.

For the second straight month, Manning finished ahead of golfer Tiger Woods in voting for the Male Athlete of the Month. Woods fired a final round 7–under 65 to win the Dubai Desert Classic. Also in February, he won the WGC Accenture Match Play Championship. Woods has now claimed wins in his first three events of the season, and has five straight wins dating back to last season.

The Iraqi National Soccer Team is the Academy's 2007 Men's Team of the Year. The team won the 2007 Asian Cup, defeating Saudi Arabia 1–0 in Jakarta to claim a miraculous victory for the war-torn country. During the Team of the Year award presentation in Washington, D.C., the Iraqi ambassador to the United States, Samir Shakir M. Sumaida’ie (left), accepted the award from Joseph Szlavik (right), President of the United States Sports Alliance and a member of the Academy Board of Visitors (Photo Credit: Russell C. Wojtusiak).

In the last minutes of the Asian Cup finals, an Iraqi Kurd named Hawar Mohammed passed to Younis Mahmoud, an Iraqi Sunni, who knocked in the game’s winning goal. As Mohammed and Mahmoud embraced on an Indonesian field some 5,000 miles from their homeland, so too did people in the streets of Iraq—momentarily forgetting that they are fighting us and each other.

It isn’t so much that Iraq won as that they even played. Mohammed, Mahmoud and their teammates developed as athletes during Saddam Hussein’s rule, a time when their predecessors on the national team were dragged bare-skinned over pavement and dipped, wounds exposed, in sewage. They had no coach until two months before the Asian Cup, and he promptly quit, citing as his reason the preservation of his sanity. When there weren’t logistical challenges, there were emotional ones. Each member of the team had lost a loved one in a bombing or shooting. But for 90 minutes, 22 men—Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites—wore the same uniform and aimed for the same goal, and it worked.

Academy National Faculty member Dr. Richard Bell (pictured right) achieved a milestone by teaching the Academy’s first ever course in Abu Dhabi. Bell taught a course in sports administration, in conjunction with the Unlimited Sport Academy and the United Arab Emirates General Authority of Youth & Sports Welfare.

The course was the first in a six-part series to be hosted by the Unlimited Sport Academy in Abu Dhabi for the United States Sports Academy’s International Certification in Sports Management (or ICSM) program.

During the past 35 years, the Academy has taught sport programs in over 60 countries and to more than a quarter of a million people. The Academy has delivered over 100 sports education programs for ministries of youth and sport, Olympic committees, international sport federations, national governing bodies, and universities, both in the U.S. and around the world.

American River College in Sacramento, Calif., has signed an articulation agreement with the Academy, joining over 30 junior and community colleges in the Associate’s to Bachelor’s Degree Program.

Articulation agreements allow students the opportunity to complete general education class work at junior or community colleges and then enroll at the Academy with the guarantee that their two-year college general education courses will be credited toward a bachelor's degree.

The Academy’s Bachelor of Sports Science (B.S.S.) degree in sports coaching, sports management and sports studies consists of the final 60 of the 120 required semester hours.

Photo Caption : Brandon Buckley (pictured above) attended junior college before completing his bachelor’s degree at the Academy. Buckley worked on his degree while serving as the bullpen catcher for the Oakland A’s, the most traveled team in Major League Baseball.

In February the Academy, in conjunction with the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), named Kadir Nelson of San Diego, Calif., as the national winner of the 2008 Sport and Art Competition in the graphic category, for his oil on canvas painting titled “Anatomy of Team Handball.”

In the 10 March 2008 issue of Sports Illustrated, Nelson’s recently published book, “We Are The Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball,” was featured in an impressive eight-page spread.

Using an Everyman player as his narrator, Kadir Nelson tells the story of Negro League baseball from its beginnings in the 1920s through its decline after Jackie Robinson crossed over to the majors in 1947. The voice is so authentic, that the reader feels transported to a seat in dusty bleachers beside the man whose memories include times shared with the great ballplayers of that day. Visit www.kadirnelson.com.

The International Society of Sports Nutrition will host it's fifth annual conference and expo on 8–10 June 2008 at the Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas. To register, please visit www.sportsnutritionsociety.org

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
— Nelson Mandela