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So your kid wants to be the next Beckham, but you've always been more of a Michael Jordan fan. Maybe iSoccer.org can help.

The Web site aims to provide the mentors of today's soccer-playing future with tools that assess players' skills as well as technical training videos for players of all skill levels.

"Knowing what to teach and how to teach it has always been a real challenge for youth soccer coaches, many of whom are well-meaning parent volunteers who lack formal training," says iSoccer founder Scott Leber.

If iSoccer is able to produce results similar to what Leber has achieved, the investment may be worth it. He was the Gatorade High School Player of the Year, and played NCAA Division 1 soccer at Stanford, where he studied industrial engineering. Before developing iSoccer, he started an East Coast youth soccer training business.

Leber's program tailors training guides to a player's current abilities. The cost of an individual session ranges from about $7 to $12 (you get a better rate when buying a package of sessions), and a session can include anywhere from nine to 22 exercises.

Covered topics and skills include laces, passing and aerial control, and each installment can be downloaded to an iPod and taken to the field. There, players practicing on their own or with their teams can watch the skill demonstrations and try out what they've learned on the spot.

Trying to help your kid learn to dribble, despite the fact the only game you've played in the past 20 years is office politics?

There's help. Weplay.com, a Web site that helps parents and coaches organize their kids' sports calendars, has a new video library just in time for the fall youth sports season.

The site offers free training videos from star athletes like Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees; 2006 MLB MVP Ryan Howard; 2008 NFL MVP Peyton Manning; USA Softball superstar and Olympic gold medalist pitcher Jennie Finch; gold medal winning soccer star Brandi Chastain; and dozens of other professional athletes. The videos provide everything from basic skills and drills to unique insights into how the pros prepare for the sports they play.
Here's what it's got:
Baseball Drills
Basketball Drills
Cheerleading Drills
Football Drills
Soccer Drills
Softball Drills

Maybe you didn't watch the game, maybe you're a huge fan of Conan O'Brien, or maybe your friends say you missed the best commercial while you were getting a drink. You can catch them online. Hulu.com seems to have most -- if not all -- of them. Here is a collection of direct links to some highlights:

The movie "Monsters vs. Aliens" and soft drink manufacturer SoBe combined for back-to-back ads demonstrating 3-D technology. Without the glasses, the effect was evident, yet harmed by a fuzzy screen.

Bob Dylan and will.i.am bridge generations on a version of Dylan's "Forever Young" for Pepsi.

Racer Danica Patrick takes her fifth shower of the day for Go Daddy Group Inc.

Conan O'Brien on a cheesy commercial he thought was only for Sweden.

Hyundai wins an award, sending competitors into screaming fits.

Ed McMahon and MC Hammer make a pitch for Cash4Gold.

Some of these commercials showed a hard edge seldom seen in Super Bowl ads, said Tim Calkins, an analyst at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The economy "is forcing advertisers to really think about how they are going to drive sales," Calkins said. "What they're doing is really focusing on differentiation."

The Internet is a haven and resource for the Olympics-obsessed as well as the casual viewer. Here's a selection:

www.NBCOlympics.com
This site should be a first stop for all things Olympic, big and small. Thus far, it's the most-visited Olympics-related Internet site, with more than 4 million unique U.S. visitors on Aug. 9 -- the first official day of competition, according to Nielsen Online.

The site has a wealth of information, including news, features, medal counts, athletes' biographies, games, polls, histories of each event, live-streaming video of events and video of completed events.

The Web site and the NBC Universal TV networks NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Oxygen, Telemundo and Universal HD are slated to offer more than 3,400 hours of programming during the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, with each event getting some degree of TV/Internet coverage.

There's even a link to a Spanish-language version of the site.

http://en.beijing2008.cn
The official Web site of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games -- in addition to the traditional scores, schedules, photographs, video, athletes' bios and event histories -- also is an excellent resource for someone actually visiting the Games, with information on transportation, tickets, event venues, food, hotels, sightseeing, shopping and other activities.

For example, one can learn that lv da gun, a jelly roll-like cake that's nicknamed "Rolling Donkey," is made with soybean flour, water and brown sugar.

"At the end of preparation, the bean-flour cake rolls in the soybean flour . . . (and) looks like a donkey rolling over in dust," according to the site.

In addition to English, there are also Chinese, French, Spanish and Arabic versions of this site.

www.olympic.org
The official site of the Olympic Movement originates in the United Kingdom and is about all things Olympic -- and not just Beijing.

Get the latest news from the International Olympic Committee. Search a complete list of medal winners going back to 1896. Find out current Olympic and world records in a variety of events and how those records have evolved over time. Take a virtual tour of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. See and rate pictures and videos at the site's multimedia gallery.

www.infoplease.com/sports/olympics/2008
Trivia fanatics will thoroughly enjoy this encyclopedic site filled with tons of Olympics factoids as well as quizzes and crossword puzzles on everything from Olympic mascots to the Ancient Greek Games and Olympic sports.

If you want to know the history of the Olympics dating back to antiquity or who has won the most gold medals in Olympic history, this site has it.

Remember Josh Robbins? He's the Redondo Beach resident who set out to attend every Major League Baseball stadium, and to set a record by doing so -- in 27 days.

He was featured in the Daily Breeze on June 14, two days before he began his trip. Robbins is chronicling his adventure on his site, thirty27.com, which features a schedule and daily blog.

Robbins' odyssey began in Seattle, where the visiting Florida Marlins played the Mariners in interleague action. He has since seen 11 games, and the 12th is tonight in Cleveland, where the Indians play the San Francisco Giants.

He has been getting some media fame through his exploits, being interviewed by local media on his stops. Even the teams know about Robbins' adventure; he boasts that more than 20 of them even comped him free tickets.

Robbins is having a better time than the teams he visits for their home games. Out of the first 10 games on Robbins' itinerary, home teams have lost 7 times in games where he was in attendance.

The Wall Street Journal has a report today that says LA Coliseum is putting naming rights on the market in the hopes of raising $100 million to pay for renovations.

The start of the naming-rights process also means a likely end to the prospects of the NFL's returning to the Coliseum. Since the Raiders left Los Angeles in 1994, the NFL has repeatedly flirted with returning a team to the region and to the Coliseum itself, at least temporarily until a new stadium could be built. The prospect of a naming-rights deal could have helped lure a new pro team.

But the Coliseum Commission's Mr. Israel said those talks have been dead since 2006, at which time the Coliseum Commission focused on signing a long-term lease with USC. Last month, the two sides signed a 25-year lease giving the Coliseum Commission 8% of USC's ticket sales -- about $1.5 million a year -- but commits the agency to a list of renovations.

With voters in California against public funding for sports stadiums, commission leaders said naming rights became the only way to pay for the projects.

"We needed a bigger boost," said Pat Lynch, the stadium's general manager. "When the naming-rights deal comes, we'll have the money we need."

LA Observed calls the idea of selling out the 85-year-old landmark "civic heresy."

With the 2008 Olympics in China only a few weeks away, attention has shifted from protests centered on the Olympic torch to the athletes and their stories.

The New York Times blog will be offering continuing coverage through the games, from multiple angles including reports that center on business and culture as well as sports.

For example, a June 12 entry features South African swimmer Natalie du Toit, an athlete who lost part of a lower leg in an accident and who has been named to her country's ParaOlympic team after also qualifying for the regular competition. She could become the first athlete to compete in both sets of games.

On the home front, The Daily News' blog offers a detailed rundown of the feats and struggles of area athletes as they chase spots on U.S. teams.

French adventurer Michel Fournier, 64, who wished to set the world skydiving record, saw his hopes float away at North Battleford, Saskatchewan on Tuesday when the helium balloon that was supposed to take him to death-defying heights for his feat, er, got away from him without him attached. The $200,000 balloon was supposed to take Fournier to a world-record height of 130,000 feet.

Fournier had hoped to break the record for the fastest and longest free fall, the highest parachute jump and the highest balloon flight. He also hoped to bring back data that will help astronauts and others survive in the highest of altitudes.

A former army paratrooper with more than 8,000 jumps under his belt, Fournier planned to be freefalling at a height three times higher than a commercial jetliner flies. A mountain climber would have to ascend the equivalent of four Mount Everests stacked one on top of the other.

To read up on Fournier, go to his site, Le Grand Saut (The Big Jump).

Terry Peterson of Lomita gets his outdoor kicks riding and bouncing around on a unicycle specially designed for extreme mountain biking.

He first caught the attention of the Daily Breeze two years ago, when we wrote a cover story about him for our features section.

These days you can catch the 52-year-old Peterson on YouTube, where he has posted numerous unicycling videos under the name “UniGeezer.” (Some include footage of him as “UniKid.”)

A piano technician by trade, Peterson has put together a compilation of the videos he has made during the past two years.

The final piece of the compilation shows him jumping and clearing a set of stairs with eight steps.

See all of Peterson’s videos on YouTube.

The NCAA tournament selections have been made. Need some help picking your brackets? First, you should read today's Tom Hoffarth column in sports.

But if that's not enough, here are some Web resources:

BracketScience.com: This site has head-to-head comparisons, historic stats, and strategies that have worked from years past.

10 Tips for Powerful Bracket Predictions: From Teamrankings.com, tells you the factors you need to consider and why some logic doesn't work.

Sportsline.com: Has a list of eight tried-and-true methods for picking a better bracket. We especially like #2:

2. Don't go putting all your No. 1 seeds in the Final Four. They might be the best teams on paper, but since 1979, it has never happened. The closest it ever came was in 1993, when three No. 1s and a No. 2 made it. Plus, do you really want to be the person in your office that picked all the top seeds? We here at CBSSports.com always make fun of that person.