Broomball By Jonathan The-Daring McMahon
Image courtesy of: CincinnatiBroomball
Image courtesy: InstantReplaySports
When
it
comes
to shaft composition, broomball players
are picky about their sticks. Before a player even looks at a potential
strike
zone, the stick’s shaft is the first to be heavily scrutinized.
Image courtesy: MinneapolisParks
There
are three universal choices
for stick composition: wood, alloy, or aluminum. As can be readily
imagined,
wooden sticks can snap and break from regular use. Their alloy and
aluminum
cousins are no better, as they bend and warp. Considering the sticks
strictly
from a physics perspective, and assuming that our analysis includes
only ideal,
non-deformed sticks, we’ll pretend that the difference in durability
between
the stick compositions is completely negligible. So without the worry
of which
shaft will bust first, a new, incredibly important area of interest
presents
itself: shaft weight.
Image
courtesy:
Clker
The
laws of kinematics rule the
broomball world.
The godlike, divinely imparted broomball moves only
when it collides with a stick. Ideally, these collisions are elastic,
in that
the ball and stick don’t remain together after colliding. Tthe ball,
optimally, moves away from
the stick after impact. In an elastic collision momentum is conserved.
This
momentum is something we want to maximize before the collision.
Assuming the
ball is at rest, we can make it shoot across the rink super fast by
giving our
broomball stick an enormous amount of momentum to transfer to the ball.
To
maximize
our
initial momentum we
need to build up both mass and velocity. Theoretically this is simple,
but a
heavy broomball stick, when a player is fatigued by the game, is rather
difficult
to swing very fast. Instead of optimizing both it is often more useful
to pick
either light and fast, or not-as-fast and heavy. In general, it
is much
easier to swing a light stick at lightening speeds. Aluminum and
alloy
sticks can be quite light, and so they are often chosen for these
“speed”
shots. Wooden sticks, the variety that make you feel like a modern
gladiator,
are usually chosen for slower, more focused “power” shots.
Image Courtesy: Chistopher
Ward
