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Zusatztext “Learning the backstory of each athlete is fascinating! as is Crouse’s depiction of how the Olympics have changed dramatically over the course of her career. The book concludes with thoughts on creating Norwich’s culture around the globe! making it a valuable read for parents! coaches! and teachers everywhere.” Informationen zum Autor Karen Crouse is an award-winning sportswriter who has been on the staff of The New York Times since 2005. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California. Norwich is her first book. Klappentext The extraordinary story of the small Vermont town that has likely produced more Olympians per capita than any other place in the country, Norwich gives “parents of young athletes a great gift—a glimpse at another way to raise accomplished and joyous competitors” ( The Washington Post ). In Norwich, Vermont—a charming town of organic farms and clapboard colonial buildings—a culture has taken root that’s the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today’s tiger moms and eagle dads. In Norwich, kids aren’t cut from teams. They don’t specialize in a single sport, and they even root for their rivals. What’s more, their hands-off parents encourage them to simply enjoy themselves. Yet this village of roughly three thousand residents has won three Olympic medals and sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past thirty years. Now, New York Times reporter and “gifted storyteller” ( The Wall Street Journal ) Karen Crouse spills Norwich’s secret to raising not just better athletes than the rest of America but happier, healthier kids. And while these “counterintuitive” (Amy Chua, bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ) lessons were honed in the New England snow, parents across the country will find that “Crouse’s message applies beyond a particular town or state” ( The Wall Street Journal ). If you’re looking for answers about how to raise joyful, resilient kids, let Norwich take you to a place that has figured it out.Norwich PROLOGUE The road to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, runs through a pocket square of a town tucked between two interstates in the northeastern United States. Near the 89 and 91 interchange lies the town of Norwich, a hilly and wooded family-oriented farming community in rural Vermont. With a main street lined with white clapboard colonial buildings and a landmark steepled church, Norwich could be a set designer’s rendition of a small New England village. It is a cartographer’s challenge, barely registering on the map with its roughly 1,440 single-family households, including mobile homes, and a musty gymnasium contained within a brick meetinghouse. What it has in abundance is room to roam; Norwich is about a four-hour drive from New York City and two hours from Boston, but it’s not all that popular as a second-home destination—the people who live there really live there. Yet despite its apparent ordinariness, Norwich is home to a probabilities puzzle for the statistics students at Dartmouth College, less than two miles away as the hermit thrush flies. This town of roughly three thousand residents has accounted for three Olympic medals, and, since 1984, has put an athlete on every US Winter Olympics team except one. Like a groundhog poking its head out of its burrow each February, every four years the Norwich athletes leave the cozy, caring cocoon of their small town for the glare of the world’s grandest sporting stage. The town doesn’t lie fallow once the snow has melted; it has also sent two athletes to the Summer Olympics. In all, Norwich has produced eleven Olympians—an even d...
