Physics of Sports Video
Football's History
The NFL has been around for over 90 years, with the first professional game being on September 26, 1920. Right now there are 32 teams in the NFL, including teams such as the Patriots, Dolphins, Forty-Niners, Cowboys, Colts, and the Eagles. There have been 52 Super Bowls. The Pittsburgh Steelers have won six super bowls, holding the record for the most Super Bowls won by a team.
Our Project:
Our goal for this project was to "create a video that breaks down all of the physics in sports, mainly looking at the physical motion of the athlete and the object being used, and then use the physics concepts to show how to maximize performance in that sport. We choose football as our sport. Once we choose football we created a storyboard and a script of our video. Both of them are shown below.
After we got our script and storyboard approved, we were able to start filming. We started filming on October 23. The first day we got a couple of videos of us throwing a football and the correct position/fundamentals. The next day we thought it would be a good idea to borrow football jerseys from our San Marin JV team. We then filmed more videos of us throwing and catching footballs and filmed a couple of tackles, while in the jerseys. An example of a video is shown below.
1D3F8D28-6E2F-483D-B1D4-F5F8B9BE61E6.MP4After the next two days of filming, we then spent three days creating our video, adding voiceovers and subtitles, and writing the calculations. We wrote our calculations on a whiteboard and showed them in between videos. We also used an app called Filmmaker Pro to draw lines and write numbers throughout the video. This helped show where the numbers from the calculations came from.
Our final video "The Physics of Football" is shown below.
Content:
Vertical Velocity
We found the vertical velocity by taking the time the ball was held in her hand (0.5 seconds) and multiplying that by the acceleration due to gravity (9.8m/s^2)
Horizontal Velocity
We found the horizontal velocity be taking the distance of the throw (in meters) and dividing it by the time (in seconds) it took to travel.
Total Velocity
To find the total velocity we used the Pythagorean Theorem to find the total velocity. We used the Vhorizantal and Vvertical as our legs and the Vtotal as the hypotenuse.
Force of Impact
To find the force we multiplied the footballs mass of 0.31kg by the acceleration of the ball which was 56.25m/s^2. This gave us the force of impact on the person catching the football.
Reflection:
Overall this project was super fun and I loved working with my team. We all worked super well together when it came to sharing and creating ideas for the project. No one was rude or mean to anyone and everyone had an extremely open mind. I feel like our open minds helped us create an amazing project because we incorporated so many different ideas in it. Also, since we were never fighting on ideas we were able to get more stuff done quickly and efficiently. Another thing that I did well was complete all my work. I was helpful with the calculations, filming, and voiceovers, making sure to put in a fair share of work.
Something we could have done better stayed on task a little bit more. Since our group was pretty close we would tend to lose focus and drift away from the project. Staying on task would have allowed us to have more time to work on other things to our video, making it even better. One way we could stay on task more is by not changing topics that we talk about until we get all of our work done. Also, I need to work on only talking to my teammates not people from other groups. This also was distracting and wasted time. In the end, our group was pretty efficient and our project came out well done.