Sport Science

If you are like me, you love sports and follow it faithfully. When I watch sports I like knowing the ins and outs of everything that I am watching. Also, I play football so it is interesting to find out data that I didn’t even know could be tracked. Thanks to our evolving technology we are able to monitor and track certain things and statistics we were not capable of doing some years back. For example, the show Sport Science (ESPN) and their incredible engineering, is able to capture some really amazing information about the sports world.

This technology gives us a better understating of how players such as Lebron James can be so dominant in the league. They monitored the strides average NBA players take to reach the other side of the court. It’s typically 13 strides but Lebron can do it in only 9. They clocked his speed down the court at over 20 mph which is as fast as all-star point guard Chris Paul. With this technology it makes for some awesome comparisons like when they tracked Lebron’s release time of his passes.

He can throw a 40 mph bullet pass to a teammate in under two tenths of a second. That’s twice as fast as an average NFL quarterback which usually takes four tenths of a second. So with this conclusion they found out that from 35 feet away or nearly 12 yards Lebron (.79 sec) can get the ball to his man faster than Tom Brady (.80 sec)

This type of technology isn’t only beneficial to the performance side of sports but the health side of things as well. They delved into sports injuries by duplicating an incident with a major league baseball pitcher getting hit with a come-backer with a crash test dummy. A come-backer is when the pitcher throws the ball at the batter and he hits it back to the pitcher, sometimes causing an injury.

They wanted to find out how much force was behind the baseball when it struck Bryce Flory on September 8^th, 2000. In trying to figure this out you a have to understand the physics of a collision. On impact, a bat flexes and like a slingshot sends the ball back at a higher speed in which it was thrown. Scientists found out that the ball that struck Bryce in the head was going 120 mph which is 30% faster than the bean bag.

With all of these improvements and evolving of technology it is very interesting to see the things we can find out. What is really crazy about it is that there is so much more out there left to be discovered in the world of sports and technology. It should be fun to see the things we can discover and unlock in the future at the rate we are going at now.