L.A. Sports Teams Need Brain Training Makeover: Open Letter to City Mayor

Dear Mayor Villaraigosa:

I’d like to report a crime. Our L.A. sports teams’ recent performance is so shameful, they should all be locked up for for public indecency. Let’s start with the dribblers – the Los Angeles Lakers – who were so bad earlier this season, they had to fire their coach. Unfortunately he wasn’t the one making all those bad shots and turnovers, so it didn’t help. The Clippers aren’t much better. They “lead” a division where almost every team has failed to win half their games. Kudos, guys.

The L.A. Kings – our vaunted Stanley Cup champion hockey team – is serious about underachieving. They are nearly DEAD LAST in their division. The Anaheim Ducks lead their division, but I’m sorry – a hockey team from Orange County?! A place where NOT being blonde and botoxed is a punishable offense? Pa-lease!

The Dodgers franchise was within a warning track’s distance of the playoffs last year until they (yep) laid an egg in their last games. Enjoying that early start on spring training, fellas?

Then there’s “football”. Our premiere college team – USC – achieved the impossible in 2012. They started the season ranked in the top 5 and ended it at 7-6, unranked and with a one way ticket to the Who Cares Bowl.

And forget the NFL because we STILL don’t have a team! What do you guys do all day downtown, make laws?! Build a pro football stadium already!

We’re not L.A. haters, we just want one sports night out where we don’t have to sit by and watch our teams get taken to the woodshed and back. So here’s a suggestion. If you don’t want to go down as the losing-est mayor in L.A. history, we’ve got one word for you, Mr. Mayor: neurofeedback.

What is neurofeedback, you may ask? EEG biofeedback,  AKA neurofeedback, is perhaps the worst kept performance enhancement secret in sports today. The memo never got to L.A., but neurofeedback is a form of cognitive brain training used by athletes all over the world to improve performance.

In 2011, the Vancouver Canucks broke a 20-year playoff curse and won the Stanley Cup. How did that happen? The entire team committed to a neurofeedback brain training regimen. The Italian National soccer team credited their improbable 2006 world championship to regular neurofeedback sessions. U.S. Beach Vollyball Olympian Kerri Walsh-Jennings’ unprecedented 3rd gold medal  in 2012 was built on athletic performance training that incorporated neurofeedback.

Olympic athletes and professionals in almost every sport swear by neurofeedback brain training while we sit here in L.A. and swear at our lousy professionals.

Mr. Mayor, we know L.A. is the city that is for want of nothing but complains about everything.  But really, we’re supposed to live life on the cutting edge; not the edge of desperation. If we want to keep to our larger-then-life cred, let’s start with out heads – our pro athletes’ brains to be precise. Brain fitness can mean the difference between winning and losing. One neurofeedback machine for each pro team – it’s all we’re asking. (And maybe one for City Hall as well.)

Start running some neurofeedback sessions and our teams will start making a run at a some championships. As Hollywood bon vivant Lindsay “Hawt Mess” Lohan might say, “We can only go up from here.”

Photo: YouTube