My experience of sports has always been about avoiding falling over, getting hit in the face with a ball or accidentally scoring a goal in my own nets so I’ve never really stopped to think about the maths that comes with sports. Both of my younger brothers are really into playing rugby and I often spend most of my time during their matches not watching them but instead trying to wrap my head how many points a try is worth. Sports and I have never really got along well so when I walked into a lecture all about maths in sports I intended to completely get lost in all the sporting rules but I surprisingly found that I actually learnt a lot and are more comfortable with the concept of maths in sport.
Prior to the lecture we had to research a sport and some of the maths that surrounds it. I decided to pick tennis because I understand the rules and the scoring system of the game and was interested to learn more. Whilst doing research I found that mathematics can be used in many ways that I would never have thought of e.g. to rank players, plan tournaments, evaluate strategies, track and predict tennis ball trajectories (Pragear, 2016). One aspect of maths in tennis I was very keen to learn more about was how to hit the perfect serve. A mathematician from University College London Nick Ovenden said that “the perfect tennis serve relies on keeping your opponent guessing about how the ball may bounce out of the service box- this can be achieved by putting spin on the ball”. Ovenden looked at the speed the ball flies through the air at, the axis of the angle the ball spins at and the force that the racket hits the ball to create the perfect serve (Thomas, 2012).
During the lecture we looked at the first football league table from 1888. The only experience I’ve had with football league tables is when my brother tries to explain to me how he’s going to win his fantasy football league. So at first I was very confused. We were instructed to re-organise the information from the matches into a modern league table so after some googling we worked out the best way to organise the teams. From the 1888 table we found that there was 132 games played by 12 different football teams. We had to organise the information from the 1888 table into 10 columns; position, team, matches played, matches won, matches drawn, matches lost, goals for, goals against, goal difference and overall points. The most difficult one to figure out was the goal difference so we came up with an equation to work it out: Points = (No. of wins x 2) + no. of draws.
After this lecture I have a new found appreciation of how maths is used in sports. Maths is pretty much used in every sport to work out the size of courts or tracks, the size of equipment and the timings used for different sports. But it is also used to work out predictions of the outcomes of games and comparison for different athletes. We watched an interesting video on the history of the 100 metre Olympic sprint and how the runners have gotten faster over time (Wimp, 2012) . This made me think of how we still haven’t reached a peak in sporting performance and how much maths can help improve athletic performance.
References
Wimp. (2012). Usain Bolt vs. 116 years of Olympic sprinters. [Online Video]. 5 August 2012. Available at: https://www.wimp.com/usain-bolt-vs-116-years-of-olympic-sprinters/?dm_i=LQE,25SE0,3LDIRH,7T51A,1/ (Accessed: 14 November 2017).
Thomas, R (2012) Spinning the Perfect Serve. Available at: https://plus.maths.org/content/spinning-perfect-serve (Accessed: 14 November 2017).
Pragear, C (2016). Maths point—the mathematics of tennis. Available at: https://www.science.org.au/curious/everything-else/tennis-maths (Accessed: 14 November 2017).
