Conor O'Kelley-Ault
cmokelleyault@alaska.edu
University of Alaska Fairbanks

Basketball
 Football
 Hockey
 Soccer
 Baseball
 Bibliography
Welcome! To the place where the world of Sports meets the world of Physics.
Here we will discuss how the world's best sports players use physics to do what they do best. They might not consciously know what they are doing, but this page will show how the laws of physics dictate how to score in different sports.
The page will cover the scoring in five main sports: Basketball and the jump shot, Football and the field goal, Hockey and the slap shot, Soccer and the perfect kick, and finally Baseball and the home-run hit.

Sports have been played since the beginning of time, all different cultures played some kind of sport, whether it was a game of skill, or a test of raw athleticism. Today sports bring people from all walks of life together in the name of competition. Today's sports primarily test an athletes skill, wits, and raw athleticism. But what if I told you that they also tested the athletes understanding of the laws of physics. There are a few simple, but unfathomably important laws to understand that can help turn even the most inexperienced player into a hot shot.


Newton's Laws
Sir Isaac Newton was the genius who is known for many scientific and mathematical discoveries. Some of his greatest work is summarized in his three laws: Newton's Laws of Motion

Law One:
"An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest"
This means, that unless something is acted on by a force, it will continue to move in that direction and speed, or not move
at all. This can be a little hard to visualize but take this for example: a ball is thrown in a straight line, eventually it slows down
and falls to the ground. However nothing has actually touched the ball so how can the first law be true?
The ball is however being acted on by a force! Gravity and air resistance cause the ball to slow down and then hit the ground.

https://www.tes.com/lessons/iYIOCb-saiw6hQ/newton-s-laws-of-motion

Had the ball been thrown in space with no air or gravity, it would travel in
the same linear path forever until another force acted on it.

Law Two:
"The sum of the forces acting on an object is equal to the mass of the object, times its acceleration"
This principle is one of the most important equations in physics and is used to solve countless problems.
It relates an object's mass and acceleration (not speed) to the total amount of force acting on the object.
This is best described with an example problem.
If an ball is kicked in a straight path with a force of 100 Newtons (the S.I. unit of force) and its mass is 2kg what is
its acceleration? The problem is simply solved by setting 100N=(2kg)(acceleration) to get an acceleration of 50m/s^2
This problem assumes that there is no friction and the ball moves in a straight linear path, things rarely work out this
well in practice, but it is a good way to put Newton's second law into practice

Law Three:
"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction"
A ball is thrown at a wall, it then bounces back in the opposite direction it came.
This is a good way to visualize Newton's Third Law. The ball exerts  a force on the wall in the positive x-direction, and the wall
is then exerting a force of the same magnitude on the ball in the negative x-direction

We will be applying these three laws of motion, and something called kinematics to determine the physics of how athletes score.