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duketectivecomics · 4 years ago

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Hey I was wondering if you know the official order of bruce gaining all the kids including harper, Barbara, and stephanie? I know its Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian but where does the other 3 and duke and cass fall in? Tia!!

So I’m gonna assume that you mean the order in which they get adopted, since finding First Appearances is one of the easier things to google for any character. (Getting First Appearance issues afterall is part of the reason some comics retain their value, so it’s usually well documented when a character first shows up. Side note: DCUguide is an excellent resource if you’re looking to comb through appearances for characters, although I’d also recommend asking for reading lists from other fans, since usually those have been curated down to essential storylines only)

I tried to provide actual issue #s where I could, but a lot of the time in comics, it’s usually something that’s dropped or hinted around or casually mentioned rather than outright boldly stated.

Also some of these characters span DECADES and their histories change depending on continuity. So I tried to account for that where I could.

But also canon is fake and everyone in fandom cherry-picks anyways so yknow. Keep THAT in mind too.

Before we dive into this, I wanna have a quick convo on what Legal Guardianship vs Adoption is.

While guardianship includes some of the same responsibilities as adoption, it also comes with a few key differences, such as allowing any living parents (also possibly any living relatives) to contest the guardianship. Adoption would make the child fully and solely the potential parent’s responsibility, and would nullify any legal ‘say’ that the biological parents may have. Also of note, is that guardianship does not allow the child in question a claim to inheritance unless the guardian specifically wills it to them, as there is again, a bit more of distance that is placed between the child and guardian, as more of a mentorship is expected to take hold. One way to look at it is that adoption is permanent (& usually a longer drawn out process bc of that), while guardianship can be more legally flexible.

With that out of the way, let’s start~

Dick: pre-flashpoint/52, it’s stated often that Dick was actually Bruce’s ward, that Bruce has legal guardianship over Dick. I know this is a nitpick and doesn’t matter bc it’s usually retconned/ignored in favor of Dick being adopted. But I think it’s a fascinating point of potential contention nonetheless. especially given the historical reason, that it was absolutely unheard of at the time for a single man to adopt a child, but no one would bat at eye if he was taking Dick in out of a sense of altruism & duty. Contract this with decades later, when he DOES appear to adopt Jason outright, which puts some friction in place between Dick & Bruce. and well, you’ve got a whole story & conflict to explore right there.

Barbara: Usually dons the Batgirl cowl after Dick becomes Robin (the only exception to that was The Batman (2004) cartoon and it was absolutely galaxy brain of them honestly) She has her own Dad though (idk if y’all know him? Jim Gordon? Yknow? The Commissioner?) so she doesn’t get adopted. She’s considered a core batfam member mostly in the sense that she’s been there so long and esp as she makes herself absolutely essential when she becomes Oracle. She has never, and will likely never be adopted by Bruce (bc again. W h e n is that gonna come up? When Jim dies? L m f a o)

Jason: pre-crisis it’s assumed from the go I guess? I could only find slight confirmation and ended up finding more info that there was a custody battle and that Bruce would won Jason back officially in Detective Comics #548. post-crisis, Jason’s history is redone, though & I remember his adoption being touched on, but could not for the life of me find a particular issue. N52/Rebirth it’s simply assumed from the go as far as I’m aware.

Tim: Batman #654. This was after his father died, though he’d been Robin at this point for at least a decade. For n52/Rebirth as far as I can tell he’s also been outright adopted by Bruce (though I think he’s parents were still alive but in Witness Protection? Idk. I haven’t read at all for Tim’s history there so take that with a heavy grain of salt)

Steph: another one who is not adopted (Crystal Brown is very much alive and taking care of Steph (barring the time Leslie Thompkins squirreled her away after faking Stephs death BUT)) She does show up pretty soon on Tim’s tail when he starts as Robin. Again, she’s considered a staple of the family because of how long she’s been involved with them. I like to think of her like Kimmy in Full House. She’s a Good Friend who’s Constantly Showing Up and is one of the family through mutual agreement on everyone’s part.

Cass: Batgirl (2008) #6, though like Tim, Cass had been Batgirl for nearly a decade at that point in continuity. She’s shown and stated many times that she considers Bruce a father/father figure and likewise that Babs, who had been mentoring her, was the closest she has to a mother. In n52/Rebirth, I have yet to see or hear about official adoption for her, but again. We usually ignore canon on that part anyways. I mean they made her into Orphan so uhhhh. Not super great yknow?

Damian: since he is biologically Bruce’s, it’s never really addressed as far as I’m aware (I have yet to read Damian’s appearances Altho he’s next on my Robin list). I personally think it’d be interesting to explore the fact that he was likely born outside of the country and what that means for Bruce gaining legal custody & whether or not Talia would contest that? I’m sure there’s probably SOME thinkpieces about it out there, but I’ll search for them on my own time eventually

And now we’re getting to *drum roll* Harper and Duke!

Harper: her appearances are mostly kept to the n52 runs, though with Tynion returning to Detective, it’s likely she’s coming back into Rebirth soon. She’s a unique case where, due to her abusive home life, she emancipated herself and took her brother, Cullen, with her. Neither she nor her brother were adopted by Bruce, and as far as I’m aware/understand, they’re fine with it that way. I know Stephanie was living with them at some point (it’s dropped in Batman & Robin: Eternal at least?), so I certainly think it would have been nice if DC also brought them into the fold like Steph. Just a couple of kids who are Really Good Friends with the family and continue to insert themselves in batfam business lmao

Duke: I actually addressed this fairly recently here! Duke’s guardianship (bc like Dick, Duke is not outright adopted by Bruce, likely to afford Duke’s parents the opportunity to regain custody should they recover from Joker’s toxin) its a little more up in the air at this point in Batman & The Outsiders. Since Bruce is very clearly taking both him and Cass away on globetrotting adventures. It would make things EASIER ofc if he is under Bruce’s guardianship. But given that it’s not really addressed, it’s led most of fandom to simply assume it instead. And really? Considering that DC themselves probably doesn’t realize that they’ve written themselves into this corner, it probably won’t be fully addressed or recognized anyways.

So to answer your first question actually: Babs, Steph, and Harper? Not adopted, likely never will be, but they ARE interspersed fairly regularly in the line-up. Everyone else? Varying degrees of being under Bruce’s guardianship if not outright adopted.

We’re all happy that they’re here, though!!! And we love and appreciate them ALL.

#batfamily #fandom stuff #asked and answered #silencespeaks10 #randywrites #today on: randy googles it!#ive read quite a bit of batfam stuff but there were some things i did have to google again to confirm #and as always i highly recommend reading for urself when you can!#but here's the best tl;dr that i can give for the time being!#long post #<- for mobile users OOOOF its long

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flauntpage · 7 years ago

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What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes'

Over the next two months VICE Sports will be profiling 16 athletes as they evolve into national superstars. Keep checking back here to find them all.

In the western Florida summer, you have two, three hours max after sunrise before the heat and humidity makes outdoor activity a dangerous proposition. 9 AM in mid-July is pushing it. In that sense, Nico Mejia is running late. On the courts of the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, Mejia takes his warm-ups with his doubles partner, Sebastian Korda. The pair try their best to rally with ease, keeping their competitive spirits at bay for as long as possible. But that never lasts long with tennis players, especially teenage boys. Soon enough, their shots increase in intensity and sweat soaks their backs.

Korda and Mejia both have tennis in their blood. Korda's father and coach, Petr Korda, won the 1998 Australian Open and 1996 Australian Open doubles with Stefan Edberg. Mejia's father, Gustavo, was an avid amateur player in Colombia, and his sister Gabriela was an All-American at the University of Miami and competed professionally. His uncle Juan Mateus—another Miami alum—is also his coach at IMG. In a sense, the question was never whether Nico Mejia would play tennis at some level but rather for how long. Still, he never felt any pressure to take up the family sport. Instead, his family stressed that whatever he chose to do in life, he needed to commit to it.

Edward Linsmier

So at the age of 12, he moved from his home in Cali, Colombia, to the tennis hotbed that is the Miami area to seriously pursue a career. "I mean, yeah it was hard," Mejia says of moving away from his family, "because I'm a person who likes to be with family. But since I moved when I was 12 years old, I kind of got used to not being with my family as much as I would like."

Mejia spent a couple years training in South Florida, beginning in 2012, but he soon outgrew the competition. There were only a few other kids his age, and they treated tennis more as a hobby than a future. Mejia, from a young age, regarded the tennis court as an arena. "On the court, he's a gladiator," Mateus said. "If he can chew you alive, he's going to do it."

At the end of 2014, Mejia reached the Junior Eddie Herr, a prestigious youth competition. He got knocked out in the Round of 32, but he had caught the attention of IMG Academy coaches, who recruited him for their tennis program. When Mejia toured the campus for the first time, he realized it was everything he had ever dreamed of. He enrolled the next year.

Edward Linsmier

For teenagers ready and able to commit completely to the rigorous lifestyle of a high-level junior athlete, there is perhaps no better place in the world than the IMG Academy. Founded in 1978 by the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri, the then eponymously named Academy was the first major tennis boarding school and fundamentally changed how elite young players trained and prepared for professional tennis careers. In 1987, the year Bollettieri sold the Academy to IMG, 27 of his former and current students played in the U.S. Open, while 32 made it to Wimbledon's main draw. As of now, the tennis program has trained ten worldwide No. 1-ranked players, including Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Serena and Venus Williams, Monica Seles, and Jim Courier. In many ways, the Academy left a permanent mark on the tennis world.

Recently, the focus of the academy has shifted slightly, in line with the Academy's overall expansion, to accommodate teenagers seeking college scholarships in addition to aspiring pros. Over the past 15 years, the IMG Academy has spread its roots far beyond tennis to include football, baseball, golf, basketball, soccer, as well as track and field. Now it's fundamentally a boarding school where each of its 1,100 students is on a sports team. The Academy's physical footprint has grown accordingly, from Bollettieri's original 40 acres to a 450-acre campus lined with gleaming, glass-enclosed structures, modern dorms for the 70 percent of students who live on-campus, a nature reserve complete with a fishing pond, and countless pristine sport fields. The entire setup conjures a European soccer academy mixed with a Division I athletic program, and in fact, the Academy's amenities outclass those found at many D-I programs: fitness facilities and uniforms sponsored by Gatorade and Under Armour respectively, hydrotherapy for injury recovery, hyperbaric chambers for increasing lung capacity, nutrition coaches, leadership training, and vision and visual cognitive training. Golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation for IMG staff, constantly hum around the campus, which has grown so much that it's now dotted with oversized maps telling you that "YOU ARE HERE."

All in all, tuition and expenses cost upwards of $70,000 per year (the Academy offers limited need-based financial aid; a spokesperson for the Academy declined to offer specifics such as how many students receive financial aid or how much the average aid package is). While IMG also runs a massive sports management agency that looms large over professional tennis, it seems that more than anything else, the Academy functions as a standalone enterprise to create a sporting oasis for whomever is willing to pay for it. In addition to the school, the Academy hosts professional athletes for off-season training programs, pro teams passing through, and some international youth tournaments.

Of course, there are academic facilities on campus, too, tailored to fit the athletes' needs and future career goals. For elite high-school-age athletes, this offers a huge advantage over traditional schooling. In addition to aiding its students in qualifying for NCAA scholarships, the Academy equips students with the skills necessary to balance the unique social and academic pressures facing college athletes, while also teaching them to deal with issues that often trip up the pros. To that end, students receive media training in addition to a heavy core emphasis on the visual and creative arts.

Edward Linsmier

A few weeks shy of 40 years old and sporting a blue IMG Academy baseball cap, Mateus describes himself as a specific kind of coach. His job is to usher teenagers through what he alternately calls "the last mile" or "the point of break." In other words, it's his job to find out if they have what it takes to become professionals, both from a talent and maturity perspective.

Mateus believes the traveling tennis lifestyle is its own form of education, albeit a very different one from a traditional high school. Young players experience a wide variety of cultures, and have to learn to be responsible in many different foreign countries. They learn a lot about their own bodies, the human anatomy, about nutrition and chemistry to ensure they adhere to the strict and confusing anti-doping guidelines of high-level tennis. Mateus also teaches his athletes to manage their finances, file expense reports, enact time-management techniques, and other practical lessons most kids are lucky to master by the time they graduate college, to say nothing of high school.

Even with all of these resources, the transition to IMG can be a tough one. For the first six months, Mejia lived in the dorms on campus while his uncle still lived in Miami. Although it was the environment he always wanted—consistently facing high-level competition and access to professional-caliber training facilities—when he wasn't playing, practicing, or training, he was bored. To kill time, he'd play FIFA with his friends. But soon after he arrived at IMG, Mejia moved in with Mateus and he rediscovered the family life he had been missing.

Edward Linsmier

"Usually, 16 is very difficult for these boys and girls," Mateus says as Mejia jokes with Korda on the court. When kids upend their lives, and by extension, their families' lives, to accomplish such a lofty goal, they can get impatient. If a kid is used to winning every tournament without much difficulty and suddenly starts losing at the Academy, he or she might think something is wrong. They start making changes to their game, to their lifestyle, to themselves. They focus on the results on the court rather than, as Mateus puts it, "the process."

According to Mateus, only one to 1.5 percent of junior tennis players go straight to the pros. The rest go to college, which Mateus emphasizes is a good thing for most kids, who need a few years of stability. Maybe their bodies or minds need to fully mature. Perhaps they can't, or don't want to, cope with the nomadic life of a pro—or, understandably enough, they might not be ready to act like an adult all of the time.

But not Mejia. Mateus lauds his nephew for having a natural instinct on the court while maintaining a healthy attitude off it. "We were able to prolong the great times until he was almost 16," Mateus tells me. In the autumn of 2016, he adds, Mejia went through an attitudinal funk, an obstacle for developing tennis players that is something of an inevitability, according to Mateus. "He had a period of two, three months," says Mateus. Last December, his nephew crossed over to what Mateus terms "the real side," the point where a young player redoubles their dedication to focus on the sport. "Now, he sees what we see as an adult. We're very happy about it. Happy for him," he adds. As Mateus describes all of this in vague terms to respect his nephew's privacy, it almost sounds like like Mejia dealt with nothing more than a rough bout of almost becoming a teenager.

Edward Linsmier

Shortly after Mejia cleared this critical hurdle, however, tragedy struck. His parents had been working towards relocating from Colombia to Florida, where they could watch their son play, develop as a player, and emerge from IMG as both a professional and a fully formed adult. But, in April of this year, Mejia's father had a heart attack and died while playing tennis at his home in Colombia.

After his father's death, Mateus noticed a further change in Mejia. While it's been a tough time for both of them, he says, the hardship "actually fueled him to actually be a little bit more [focused on] what he's doing. He's filling a gap of whatever was left of his maturity. This helped him to realize that he has a lot more to live." For his part, Mejia discusses the impact of his father's death with a steely gaze. The last few months have been hard for him, he says, but he's doing his best to remember what his father taught him, to always be fighting, always be improving, always be competing, and, of course, to never give up. Sticking to platitudes while discussing a turbulent time in his life, Mejia already sounds like a seasoned professional.

Though the other top players at the Academy are expected to grow up quickly, they're still kids who need the companionship and support that only friends and family can offer. In this sense, Mejia's family is trying to adapt: in addition to having his uncle on campus, his mother is still planning to move up to Florida to join him. And he's made friends, too. That weekend, he had plans to go mini-golfing with Emiliana Arango, another Academy tennis player also from Colombia. I spoke to her mother, Juliana Restrepo, shortly before Mejia and Mateus as Arango practiced on an adjacent court. For Restrepo, who rents a house five minutes away from IMG, sending her daughter to IMG was "one of the best moves I've made because here she has everything that she needs." In her eyes, the place is like "Disneyland for athletes."

Unlike Mejia, Arango doesn't come from a tennis family. Instead, she grew up on a ranch in Medellin, where her family kept horses and cows. Her first love was horseback riding, but all that changed the first time she picked up a tennis racket, at five and a half years old. Arango loved playing on the clay courts. Restrepo recalls that her daughter would be "orange from head to toe" by the time they got home. At first, she played tennis once a week. Then twice a week. Soon, she was taking tennis lessons every day. By the time she was six, Arango was playing in organized competitions.

Edward Linsmier

As Restrepo tells it, it wasn't long after her first tournament that her daughter, while watching the French Open on television, made a prediction: "Mom, I'm going to play there, I'm going to win that, and I'm going to win it many times, and I'm going to be there, and I want to be sponsored by Nike." She stopped horseback riding and hanging out with friends as much. Instead of going to birthday parties, she preferred to play tennis.

By the time she was 12 years old, Arango was winning nearly every junior competition in Colombia that she entered. The family had already moved to Bogota to train at Colombia's best tennis academy, but it was clear Arango needed another step up. At that point, her mother faced a decision: Should she stop working as an architect for a multinational company, move to Florida with Arango to pursue her dream, and break up the family? Or should she keep the family and their lives intact, even if it meant ending any serious prospects for her daughter's tennis career?

"I decided it was a chance I had to take with her," Restrepo says as we watch Arango practice on the IMG courts. She viewed not moving to Florida as taking something away from her daughter, something she could never give back. She couldn't bring herself to do that. Not with the way Arango treated tennis. But, before they moved, she made a deal with her daughter: "Whenever I want this more than you do, that's the moment when I'm going to stop supporting you."

Edward Linsmier

This conundrum is not unique to Arango and her mother. For every teenage tennis player trying to make the jump from the youth circuit to the professional level, there is a family that must give up any semblance of a typical life. That athlete, in turn, must give up any semblance of being a normal kid.

A decade later, Arango's dream hasn't wavered, and some of it has even come true––she's sponsored by Nike these days. Now entering what would be her junior year, she spends her mornings at the Academy on the court and with the physical therapist doing recovery work before heading home to eat lunch. In the afternoon, she rests for a few hours, maybe takes a nap, before going to fitness training for two and a half hours. After dinner around 7 PM, she does schoolwork with her tutor—who she used before IMG and decided to stick with—via Skype until 9:30 or 10:30.

In tennis, even youth players spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. Arango travels for approximately half the year, with her mother accompanying her and handling all the arrangements. After practice, Arango tells me that when heading from tournament to tournament, "sometimes my mom makes me go sightseeing. You just want to, like, stay in bed a little bit more and mom's like, 'Come on!' We're like in, say, Barcelona, [and my mom says,] 'You're seriously going to stay in bed?'" To maximize her sleeping time, Arango has developed a very specific packing routine, organizing her clothes by outfit rather than by article of clothing. "So I just get there and just have to get it out and put it on."

To fend off boredom during the long flights or nights in the hotel when she's too exhausted to go explore, she likes to watch Grey's Anatomy on Netflix. While she often comes off as an old soul, Arango communicates from the road in the same ways that everyone else her age does. "I'll text and Snapchat or whatever" when she wants to keep up with friends, she says. "I'm not, like, 'Hey, let's call and talk to each other,'" she adds, citing generational differences between her and Restrepo. "Like, my mom doesn't Snapchat and doesn't understand. 'Why would you take selfies and send them to someone else?'," she says, good-naturedly mimicking her mother. "She'll text her sister and say, 'Hey I've got something to tell you,' and her sister answers 'OK' and then they'll call. But it's, like, why would you call me?"

Edward Linsmier

Before meeting Arango and Mejia, I suspected they––or their relatives––might feel as if by pursuing a tennis career, they've missed out on the critical stage in every person's life where they're given the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and come away from it all with a sense of identity. Instead, the two teenagers showed me that perhaps that stage is only critical for the many of us who have no idea what we want to be when we grow up. Those years of rebelliousness and experimentation are useless to someone who already has it all figured out. For better or worse, their identity is already set. They're tennis players.

"If you ask her, she feels awkward seeing all the other kids doing stuff she thinks is meaningless," Restrepo tells me. When I bring this up to Arango, it becomes clear how ensconced in the athletic life she has become. One of the things she gets most excited about is not seeing Notre Dame in Paris or going to the Floridian beach with friends, most of whom she knows through IMG or the tennis world. Instead, her face brightens the most when discussing getting her rackets strung. "I mean, other than coming here and going to the gym, the only other place I go during the day is to…string my rackets. Which I love! I love the guy that works there because he's like a neighbor. He'll drop off my rackets so I don't actually have to pick them up."

"I tell her all the time: this is the world you decided," Restrepo says as we watch her daughter, wearing her signature backwards hat, hit groundstrokes on the court. "There's no time for tantrums or [other] teenager things." Arango expresses some mild frustration as her return volley isn't quite how she wanted it. Her coach, with whom she's rallying, waves it off, and they continue. Reflecting on the path her daughter has chosen, Restrepo says, "Sometimes, this is a lonely, very lonely career."

Earlier in day, I asked Arango to imagine her life without tennis. She had a quick answer to all my other questions, but not this one. "I don't know," she said, cracking a smile and looking up into the distance. She has apparently never thought about it. Of course she hasn't, I realized immediately afterward: I asked her to reimagine her life starting from age six. To answer, she would have to go back to Colombia, back on the horses. And that's why her mom took the tremendous step to bring her to Florida and to the Academy. "She's passionate about it," her mother will tell me later. "I think she was born for this."

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: "I mean, I wouldn't know. I mean, what I would do."

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes' published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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amtushinfosolutionspage · 7 years ago

Text

What Life Is Like at ‘Disneyland for Athletes’

In the western Florida summer, you have two, three hours max after sunrise before the heat and humidity makes outdoor activity a dangerous proposition. 9 AM in mid-July is pushing it. In that sense, Nico Mejia is running late. On the courts of the IMG Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, Mejia takes his warm-ups with his doubles partner, Sebastian Korda. The pair try their best to rally with ease, keeping their competitive spirits at bay for as long as possible. But that never lasts long with tennis players, especially teenage boys. Soon enough, their shots increase in intensity and sweat soaks their backs.

Korda and Mejia both have tennis in their blood. Korda’s father and coach, Petr Korda, won the 1998 Australian Open and 1996 Australian Open doubles with Stefan Edberg. Mejia’s father, Gustavo, was an avid amateur player in Colombia, and his sister Gabriela was an All-American at the University of Miami and competed professionally. His uncle Juan Mateus—another Miami alum—is also his coach at IMG. In a sense, the question was never whether Nico Mejia would play tennis at some level but rather for how long. Still, he never felt any pressure to take up the family sport. Instead, his family stressed that whatever he chose to do in life, he needed to commit to it.

Edward Linsmier

So at the age of 12, he moved from his home in Cali, Colombia, to the tennis hotbed that is the Miami area to seriously pursue a career. “I mean, yeah it was hard,” Mejia says of moving away from his family, “because I’m a person who likes to be with family. But since I moved when I was 12 years old, I kind of got used to not being with my family as much as I would like.”

Mejia spent a couple years training at Club Med Tennis Academy, beginning in 2012, but he soon outgrew the competition. There were only a few other kids his age, and they treated tennis more as a hobby than a future. Mejia, from a young age, regarded the tennis court as an arena. “On the court, he’s a gladiator,” Mateus said. “If he can chew you alive, he’s going to do it.”

At the end of 2014, Mejia reached the Junior Orange Bowl, a prestigious youth competition hosted in Miami. He got knocked out in the Round of 32, but he had caught the attention of IMG Academy coaches, who recruited him for their tennis program. When Mejia toured the campus for the first time, he realized it was everything he had ever dreamed of. He enrolled the next year.

Edward Linsmier

For teenagers ready and able to commit completely to the rigorous lifestyle of a high-level junior athlete, there is perhaps no better place in the world than the IMG Academy. Founded in 1978 by the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri, the then eponymously named Academy was the first major tennis boarding school and fundamentally changed how elite young players trained and prepared for professional tennis careers. In 1987, the year Bollettieri sold the Academy to IMG, 27 of his former and current students played in the U.S. Open, while 32 made it to Wimbledon’s main draw. As of now, the tennis program has trained ten worldwide No. 1-ranked players, including Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Serena and Venus Williams, Monica Seles, and Jim Courier. In many ways, the Academy left a permanent mark on the tennis world.

Recently, the focus of the academy has shifted slightly, in line with the Academy’s overall expansion, to accommodate teenagers seeking college scholarships in addition to aspiring pros. Over the past 15 years, the IMG Academy has spread its roots far beyond tennis to include football, baseball, golf, basketball, soccer, as well as track and field. Now it’s fundamentally a boarding school where each of its 1,100 students is on a sports team. The Academy’s physical footprint has grown accordingly, from Bollettieri’s original 40 acres to a 450-acre campus lined with gleaming, glass-enclosed structures, modern dorms for the 70 percent of students who live on-campus, a nature reserve complete with a fishing pond, and countless pristine sport fields. The entire setup conjures a European soccer academy mixed with a Division I athletic program, and in fact, the Academy’s amenities outclass those found at many D-I programs: fitness facilities and uniforms sponsored by Gatorade and Under Armour respectively, hydrotherapy for injury recovery, hyperbaric chambers for increasing lung capacity, nutrition coaches, leadership training, and vision and visual cognitive training. Golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation for IMG staff, constantly hum around the campus, which has grown so much that it’s now dotted with oversized maps telling you that “YOU ARE HERE.”

Of course, there are academic facilities on campus, too, tailored to fit the athletes’ needs and future career goals. For elite high-school-age athletes, this offers a huge advantage over traditional schooling. In addition to aiding its students in qualifying for NCAA scholarships, the Academy equips students with the skills necessary to balance the unique social and academic pressures facing college athletes, while also teaching them to deal with issues that often trip up the pros. To that end, students receive media training in addition to a heavy core emphasis on the visual and creative arts.

Edward Linsmier

A few weeks shy of 40 years old and sporting a blue IMG Academy baseball cap, Mateus describes himself as a specific kind of coach. His job is to usher teenagers through what he alternately calls “the last mile” or “the point of break.” In other words, it’s his job to find out if they have what it takes to become professionals, both from a talent and maturity perspective.

Even with all of these resources, the transition to IMG can be a tough one. For the first six months, Mejia lived in the dorms on campus while his uncle still lived in Miami. Although it was the environment he always wanted—consistently facing high-level competition and access to professional-caliber training facilities—when he wasn’t playing, practicing, or training, he was bored. To kill time, he’d play FIFA with his friends. But soon after he arrived at IMG, Mejia moved in with Mateus and he rediscovered the family life he had been missing.

Edward Linsmier

“Usually, 16 is very difficult for these boys and girls,” Mateus says as Mejia jokes with Korda on the court. When kids upend their lives, and by extension, their families’ lives, to accomplish such a lofty goal, they can get impatient. If a kid is used to winning every tournament without much difficulty and suddenly starts losing at the Academy, he or she might think something is wrong. They start making changes to their game, to their lifestyle, to themselves. They focus on the results on the court rather than, as Mateus puts it, “the process.”

According to Mateus, only one to 1.5 percent of junior tennis players go straight to the pros. The rest go to college, which Mateus emphasizes is a good thing for most kids, who need a few years of stability. Maybe their bodies or minds need to fully mature. Perhaps they can’t, or don’t want to, cope with the nomadic life of a pro—or, understandably enough, they might not be ready to act like an adult all of the time.

But not Mejia. Mateus lauds his nephew for having a natural instinct on the court while maintaining a healthy attitude off it. “We were able to prolong the great times until he was almost 16,” Mateus tells me. In the autumn of 2016, he adds, Mejia went through an attitudinal funk, an obstacle for developing tennis players that is something of an inevitability, according to Mateus. “He had a period of two, three months,” says Mateus. Last December, his nephew crossed over to what Mateus terms “the real side,” the point where a young player redoubles their dedication to focus on the sport. “Now, he sees what we see as an adult. We’re very happy about it. Happy for him,” he adds. As Mateus describes all of this in vague terms to respect his nephew’s privacy, it almost sounds like like Mejia dealt with nothing more than a rough bout of almost becoming a teenager.

Edward Linsmier

Shortly after Mejia cleared this critical hurdle, however, tragedy struck. His parents had been working towards relocating from Colombia to Florida, where they could watch their son play, develop as a player, and emerge from IMG as both a professional and a fully formed adult. But, in April of this year, Mejia’s father had a heart attack and died while playing tennis at his home in Colombia.

After his father’s death, Mateus noticed a further change in Mejia. While it’s been a tough time for both of them, he says, the hardship “actually fueled him to actually be a little bit more [focused on] what he’s doing. He’s filling a gap of whatever was left of his maturity. This helped him to realize that he has a lot more to live.” For his part, Mejia discusses the impact of his father’s death with a steely gaze. The last few months have been hard for him, he says, but he’s doing his best to remember what his father taught him, to always be fighting, always be improving, always be competing, and, of course, to never give up. Sticking to platitudes while discussing a turbulent time in his life, Mejia already sounds like a seasoned professional.

Though the other top players at the Academy are expected to grow up quickly, they’re still kids who need the companionship and support that only friends and family can offer. In this sense, Mejia’s family is trying to adapt: in addition to having his uncle on campus, his mother is still planning to move up to Florida to join him. And he’s made friends, too. That weekend, he had plans to go mini-golfing with Emiliana Arango, another Academy tennis player also from Colombia. I spoke to her mother, Juliana Restrepo, shortly before Mejia and Mateus as Arango practiced on an adjacent court. For Restrepo, who rents a house five minutes away from IMG, sending her daughter to IMG was “one of the best moves I’ve made because here she has everything that she needs.” In her eyes, the place is like “Disneyland for athletes.”

Unlike Mejia, Arango doesn’t come from a tennis family. Instead, she grew up on a ranch in Medellin, where her family kept horses and cows. Her first love was horseback riding, but all that changed the first time she picked up a tennis racket, at five and a half years old. Arango loved playing on the clay courts. Restrepo recalls that her daughter would be “orange from head to toe” by the time they got home. At first, she played tennis once a week. Then twice a week. Soon, she was taking tennis lessons every day. By the time she was six, Arango was playing in organized competitions.

Edward Linsmier

As Restrepo tells it, it wasn’t long after her first tournament that her daughter, while watching the French Open on television, made a prediction: “Mom, I’m going to play there, I’m going to win that, and I’m going to win it many times, and I’m going to be there, and I want to be sponsored by Nike.” She stopped horseback riding and hanging out with friends as much. Instead of going to birthday parties, she preferred to play tennis.

By the time she was 12 years old, Arango was winning nearly every junior competition in Colombia that she entered. The family had already moved to Bogota to train at Colombia’s best tennis academy, but it was clear Arango needed another step up. At that point, her mother faced a decision: Should she stop working as an architect for a multinational company, move to Florida with Arango to pursue her dream, and break up the family? Or should she keep the family and their lives intact, even if it meant ending any serious prospects for her daughter’s tennis career?

“I decided it was a chance I had to take with her,” Restrepo says as we watch Arango practice on the IMG courts. She viewed not moving to Florida as taking something away from her daughter, something she could never give back. She couldn’t bring herself to do that. Not with the way Arango treated tennis. But, before they moved, she made a deal with her daughter: “Whenever I want this more than you do, that’s the moment when I’m going to stop supporting you.”

Edward Linsmier

A decade later, Arango’s dream hasn’t wavered, and some of it has even come true––she’s sponsored by Nike these days. Now entering what would be her junior year, she spends her mornings at the Academy on the court and with the physical therapist doing recovery work before heading home to eat lunch. In the afternoon, she rests for a few hours, maybe takes a nap, before going to fitness training for two and a half hours. After dinner around 7 PM, she does schoolwork with her tutor—who she used before IMG and decided to stick with—via Skype until 9:30 or 10:30.

In tennis, even youth players spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. Arango travels for approximately half the year, with her mother accompanying her and handling all the arrangements. After practice, Arango tells me that when heading from tournament to tournament, “sometimes my mom makes me go sightseeing. You just want to, like, stay in bed a little bit more and mom’s like, ‘Come on!’ We’re like in, say, Barcelona, [and my mom says,] ‘You’re seriously going to stay in bed?'” To maximize her sleeping time, Arango has developed a very specific packing routine, organizing her clothes by outfit rather than by article of clothing. “So I just get there and just have to get it out and put it on.”

To fend off boredom during the long flights or nights in the hotel when she’s too exhausted to go explore, she likes to watch Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix. While she often comes off as an old soul, Arango communicates from the road in the same ways that everyone else her age does. “I’ll text and Snapchat or whatever” when she wants to keep up with friends, she says. “I’m not, like, ‘Hey, let’s call and talk to each other,'” she adds, citing generational differences between her and Restrepo. “Like, my mom doesn’t Snapchat and doesn’t understand. ‘Why would you take selfies and send them to someone else?’,” she says, good-naturedly mimicking her mother. “She’ll text her sister and say, ‘Hey I’ve got something to tell you,’ and her sister answers ‘OK’ and then they’ll call. But it’s, like, why would you call me?”

Edward Linsmier

Before meeting Arango and Mejia, I suspected they––or their relatives––might feel as if by pursuing a tennis career, they’ve missed out on the critical stage in every person’s life where they’re given the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and come away from it all with a sense of identity. Instead, the two teenagers showed me that perhaps that stage is only critical for the many of us who have no idea what we want to be when we grow up. Those years of rebelliousness and experimentation are useless to someone who already has it all figured out. For better or worse, their identity is already set. They’re tennis players.

“If you ask her, she feels awkward seeing all the other kids doing stuff she thinks is meaningless,” Restrepo tells me. When I bring this up to Arango, it becomes clear how ensconced in the athletic life she has become. One of the things she gets most excited about is not seeing Notre Dame in Paris or going to the Floridian beach with friends, most of whom she knows through IMG or the tennis world. Instead, her face brightens the most when discussing getting her rackets strung. “I mean, other than coming here and going to the gym, the only other place I go during the day is to…string my rackets. Which I love! I love the guy that works there because he’s like a neighbor. He’ll drop off my rackets so I don’t actually have to pick them up.”

“I tell her all the time: this is the world you decided,” Restrepo says as we watch her daughter, wearing her signature backwards hat, hit groundstrokes on the court. “There’s no time for tantrums or [other] teenager things.” Arango expresses some mild frustration as her return volley isn’t quite how she wanted it. Her coach, with whom she’s rallying, waves it off, and they continue. Reflecting on the path her daughter has chosen, Restrepo says, “Sometimes, this is a lonely, very lonely career.”

Earlier in day, I asked Arango to imagine her life without tennis. She had a quick answer to all my other questions, but not this one. “I don’t know,” she said, cracking a smile and looking up into the distance. She has apparently never thought about it. Of course she hasn’t, I realized immediately afterward: I asked her to reimagine her life starting from age six. To answer, she would have to go back to Colombia, back on the horses. And that’s why her mom took the tremendous step to bring her to Florida and to the Academy. “She’s passionate about it,” her mother will tell me later. “I think she was born for this.”

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: “I mean, I wouldn’t know. I mean, what I would do.”

What Life Is Like at ‘Disneyland for Athletes’ syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

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yes-dal456 · 7 years ago

Text

Her Heart Stopped At His Restaurant. He Gave Her 'The Gift Of Tomorrow.'

When Richmond Carson became a manager of Carma restaurant in Leawood, Kansas, his mom recommended he learn some lifesaving skills, including CPR.

“You never know when you might need it,” she said.

With a setup like that, you can probably guess where this story is headed. And you’re right, for the most part. But as with any good tale, this one has many layers – twists and turns, drama and tension, coincidences and lessons, all connected by a mother’s wisdom.

***

It started on a Saturday in January 2015.

Nancy Holland spent the day grocery shopping, bathing her boxer puppy, Lincoln, and getting her nails painted in her favorite polish, a pink-red tone called Dutch Tulips. She kept so busy that she and her husband, Jim, were a few minutes late to dinner with their neighbors.

Carma wasn’t among their go-to restaurants, which is why they picked it. Jim wanted to break from their routine and remembered the delicious rigatoni the one time they ate there.

The hostess, Bria, seated them in the main dining room near the bathroom. Nancy asked if another table was available and Bria took them to the private dining rooms.

A few bites into her salad, Nancy pushed her plate aside. She said, “I’ll be right back,” and walked to the bathroom.

Another woman already was in there. She soon ran out screaming, “Some woman passed out in the bathroom!”

***

Richmond found Nancy face-down, drenched in blood from her nose and tongue, casualties of her smashing into the floor.

Fearing a neck injury, he didn’t want to move her. But she also didn’t have a pulse. The 911 operator insisted he flip her over because getting her breathing mattered most.

“Do you know CPR?” asked the woman from the bathroom, her name never captured, only her voice on the 911 tape.

Richmond provided CPR until paramedics arrived, keeping blood circulating. The first responders also brought an automated external defibrillator, or AED, because the restaurant didn’t have one. It took three jolts to restart Nancy’s heart.

At their secluded table, Jim and friends were oblivious. They saw lights from a fire truck but didn’t know they were answering a call at this restaurant.

Nancy had been gone about 10 minutes when the other woman in their group went to check on her. Jim ended up arriving to see his wife’s bloody body popping off the ground from the force of the AED.

Paramedics loaded Nancy into an ambulance and Jim got into a police car that would follow the ambulance. Only, the ambulance didn’t move.

A police officer went to check on the delay. Nancy’s heart had stopped again.

***

Nancy had no family history of heart disease … at least, not until three months before, when her dad suffered the kind of heart attack so severe it’s dubbed “the widow maker.”

Perfect response by paramedics saved his life. It included a helicopter rescue from his home in rural Arkansas.

Nancy wasn’t having a heart attack, though.

When a heart stops suddenly, without symptoms, it’s almost always cardiac arrest. Often considered synonymous with a heart attack, they are different. A heart attack is like a plumbing problem, cardiac arrest is more of an electrical malfunction.

But Nancy had something in common with her dad. Thanks to Richmond and the first responders, she, too, received textbook care.

It also helped that the hospital was three blocks away.

***

The source of Nancy’s problem was a blood clot that likely formed outside her heart. When it got there, it acted like a trip wire, shutting off the heart’s electricity and causing her to collapse.

She could’ve died, especially if she’d been in that bathroom alone. The clot, meanwhile, kept going until settling at the top of her heart.

It’s still there. It probably won’t go anywhere, either. Doctors are monitoring it and are confident it poses no threat. She’s 47 and in good physical condition, her risks further minimized by lifestyle choices: she doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks and exercises regularly.

Back at the hospital on Jan. 17, 2015, they weren’t taking any chances. After discovering the problem during a cardiac catheterization procedure, doctors put Nancy into a medically induced coma and lowered her body temperature to help preserve her organs as she recovered from the trauma.

The coma lasted for two days. She was in the hospital 10 more.

About two weeks later, friends threw a dinner party. At Carma, a name that now carried added meaning.

***

During those first few weeks of her second chance at life, Nancy’s mind raced.

“You’re scared to walk up the stairs, scared to walk to the mailbox, scared to get off the couch,” she said. “You’re thinking, `What did I do to bring on the clot to begin with?’”

She also thought about what she almost lost: Jim and their sons Dane, then a senior in high school, and Chance, a sophomore at the time.

“You make these deals with God, `If you can only give me a couple of years to get my kids to college so they can start their lives and not have to come home to an empty house, you can take me then,’” she said.

Returning to Carma pulled her from her emotional funk. What really did it was meeting Richmond – and his mother, Mari, a respiratory therapist.

Nancy and Richmond hugged and she cried while whispering thanks. It set a template that repeats every Christmas and Easter, birthdays and anniversaries, Valentine’s Day and any day that’s special. They celebrate together in person when they can, by text if they can’t.

Nancy missed Richmond’s wedding – to Bria, the hostess who’d seated the Hollands on that fateful night – because it was at the exact time as Dane’s high school graduation. Nancy and Jim were at the hospital the night the couple’s first baby arrived, a daughter named Avaya.

Chance graduated from high school a few weeks ago. Nancy’s eyes remained dry throughout the festivities. Until Richmond arrived at their party.

“You saved me, you breathed life back into my body and you gave me the gift of tomorrow,” she whispered between sobs. “I’ve gotten to see proms and first loves, I’ve gotten to take my children off to college, all because of you.”

***

Everyone should know Hands-Only CPR. After all, there are only two steps. When you see a teen or adult collapse:

Call 911.

Push hard and fast in the center of the chest, preferably to the beat of the disco song “Stayin’ Alive.”

Those are the basics. We also encourage everyone to extend their training to include conventional CPR and how to use an AED. Using mouth-to-mouth breathing can provide oxygen to vital organs, preventing brain damage.

For employers, it only makes sense to provide their staff this vital training. In addition to protecting their greatest resource (their employees), the session could be a fun, team-building experience.

Two new surveys commissioned by my organization, the American Heart Association, show that most workers lack access to CPR and First Aid training, and half couldn’t locate an AED at work. All this despite reports showing there are 10,000 cardiac arrests in the workplace each year. It’s why the AHA is launching a campaign to promote First Aid, CPR and AED training in the workplace, as well as expanded access to AEDs. (One more stat: 350,000-plus cardiac arrests that occur outside of hospitals each year with more than 100,000 occurring outside the home. That’s 11 every hour.)

youtube

Some workplaces are ahead of the curve. Like the Coast Guard, where Nancy’s dad worked. He was trained in CPR in the early days of the national rollout and used it on a stranger in Manhattan in the early 1980s. He revived the man in time for paramedics to take him to the hospital.

In the late 1990s, Nancy worked for the Kauffman Foundation, and her entire office received training in lifesaving skills.

Then there’s Fisher Phillips, the law firm where Jim Holland is the managing partner of the Kansas City office.

Since August 2015, the company has installed AEDs in all 32 offices across the country and offered CPR training to all 700 employees.

It’s called the “Richmond Initiative.”

Nancy has put her devotion into action, too, going from honoree to board member of the local chapter of the HeartSafe Foundation, which is devoted to awareness and education about Hands-Only CPR and AEDs.

“Training takes merely a few minutes of your life but it can be the difference between life and death for someone else,” Nancy said. “Like Richmond’s mom said, you owe it to others to have this skill set.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2sIUKXt from Blogger http://ift.tt/2rK8yle

#http://www.happiness2arab.tk/2017/06/her-heart-stopped-at-his-restaurant-he.html

0 notes

imreviewblog · 7 years ago

Text

Her Heart Stopped At His Restaurant. He Gave Her 'The Gift Of Tomorrow.'

When Richmond Carson became a manager of Carma restaurant in Leawood, Kansas, his mom recommended he learn some lifesaving skills, including CPR.

“You never know when you might need it,” she said.

***

It started on a Saturday in January 2015.

Carma wasn’t among their go-to restaurants, which is why they picked it. Jim wanted to break from their routine and remembered the delicious rigatoni the one time they ate there.

The hostess, Bria, seated them in the main dining room near the bathroom. Nancy asked if another table was available and Bria took them to the private dining rooms.

A few bites into her salad, Nancy pushed her plate aside. She said, “I’ll be right back,” and walked to the bathroom.

Another woman already was in there. She soon ran out screaming, “Some woman passed out in the bathroom!”

***

Richmond found Nancy face-down, drenched in blood from her nose and tongue, casualties of her smashing into the floor.

Fearing a neck injury, he didn’t want to move her. But she also didn’t have a pulse. The 911 operator insisted he flip her over because getting her breathing mattered most.

“Do you know CPR?” asked the woman from the bathroom, her name never captured, only her voice on the 911 tape.

At their secluded table, Jim and friends were oblivious. They saw lights from a fire truck but didn’t know they were answering a call at this restaurant.

Nancy had been gone about 10 minutes when the other woman in their group went to check on her. Jim ended up arriving to see his wife’s bloody body popping off the ground from the force of the AED.

Paramedics loaded Nancy into an ambulance and Jim got into a police car that would follow the ambulance. Only, the ambulance didn’t move.

A police officer went to check on the delay. Nancy’s heart had stopped again.

***

Nancy had no family history of heart disease … at least, not until three months before, when her dad suffered the kind of heart attack so severe it’s dubbed “the widow maker.”

Perfect response by paramedics saved his life. It included a helicopter rescue from his home in rural Arkansas.

Nancy wasn’t having a heart attack, though.

But Nancy had something in common with her dad. Thanks to Richmond and the first responders, she, too, received textbook care.

It also helped that the hospital was three blocks away.

***

She could’ve died, especially if she’d been in that bathroom alone. The clot, meanwhile, kept going until settling at the top of her heart.

The coma lasted for two days. She was in the hospital 10 more.

About two weeks later, friends threw a dinner party. At Carma, a name that now carried added meaning.

***

During those first few weeks of her second chance at life, Nancy’s mind raced.

“You’re scared to walk up the stairs, scared to walk to the mailbox, scared to get off the couch,” she said. “You’re thinking, `What did I do to bring on the clot to begin with?’”

She also thought about what she almost lost: Jim and their sons Dane, then a senior in high school, and Chance, a sophomore at the time.

Returning to Carma pulled her from her emotional funk. What really did it was meeting Richmond – and his mother, Mari, a respiratory therapist.

Chance graduated from high school a few weeks ago. Nancy’s eyes remained dry throughout the festivities. Until Richmond arrived at their party.

***

Everyone should know Hands-Only CPR. After all, there are only two steps. When you see a teen or adult collapse:

Call 911.

Push hard and fast in the center of the chest, preferably to the beat of the disco song “Stayin’ Alive.”

youtube

In the late 1990s, Nancy worked for the Kauffman Foundation, and her entire office received training in lifesaving skills.

Then there’s Fisher Phillips, the law firm where Jim Holland is the managing partner of the Kansas City office.

Since August 2015, the company has installed AEDs in all 32 offices across the country and offered CPR training to all 700 employees.

It’s called the “Richmond Initiative.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://bit.ly/2stmYn6

#Healthy Living - The Huffington Post

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flauntpage · 7 years ago

Text

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes'

Over the next two months VICE Sports will be profiling 16 athletes as they evolve into national superstars. Keep checking back here to find them all.

Edward Linsmier

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: "I mean, I wouldn't know. I mean, what I would do."

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes' published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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flauntpage · 7 years ago

Text

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes'

In the western Florida summer, you have two, three hours max after sunrise before the heat and humidity makes outdoor activity a dangerous proposition. 9 AM in mid-July is pushing it. In that sense, Nico Mejia is running late. On the courts of the IMG Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, Mejia takes his warm-ups with his doubles partner, Sebastian Korda. The pair try their best to rally with ease, keeping their competitive spirits at bay for as long as possible. But that never lasts long with tennis players, especially teenage boys. Soon enough, their shots increase in intensity and sweat soaks their backs.

Edward Linsmier

Mejia spent a couple years training at Club Med Tennis Academy, beginning in 2012, but he soon outgrew the competition. There were only a few other kids his age, and they treated tennis more as a hobby than a future. Mejia, from a young age, regarded the tennis court as an arena. "On the court, he's a gladiator," Mateus said. "If he can chew you alive, he's going to do it."

Edward Linsmier

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: "I mean, I wouldn't know. I mean, what I would do."

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes' published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

0 notes