A word a day

I'm on this Spanish word-a-day mailing list to help keep my vocabulary up. Having done nothing but Golden Age literature since college I can talk forever about Cervantes and literary authority, but my practical and useful vocabulary is a bit rusty. So this word-a-day list is a good little way to brush up on vocabulary, as people will probably find me as crazy as don Quijote if I called them "Your Grace" and talked about knight-errantry in 17th century Spanish.

So anyway, for each word, they use it in a sentence. Some of the phrases are pretty useful, as you would find them in everyday life. Today's word was "retroceso" (recession), and the sentence was this:

Atribuyen el retroceso español al escaso aprovechamiento de las nuevas tecnologias.
They attribute the Spanish recession to the scarce exploitation of new technologies.

That could be something that you hear on the news or read in the paper, especially these days. But yesterday's word was "jugadores" (players), and the sentence was this:

Los jugadores se encuentran de vacaciones.
The players are on vacation.

Huh? Maybe this is something you would read in a sports section, but it just seems so random. Wouldn't it be a good opportunity to teach some other sports terminology, like "The players scored three goals in the second quarter"?

Maybe there's something about language pedagogy that I'm not getting here.