The Physics of Lacrosse

Here we go: Yowza! I had a fun weekend. I'm kinda bummed because its my last family fair. I won a butt load of inflatable guitars on Saturday though. I love those! In tenth grade, I made a video of me air guitaring in a huge pink cowboy hat that I won from the fair and short shorts. It was really embarrassing. Oh, here is something embarassing. Today I went to get my permit at the DMV. Yes, my permit. My parents set a GPA quota when I turned 16, but I guess they gave already. Any way, I go in there and it was like Iolani up the anus. I guess because we are the only school that has today off. So I cram my fanny off for the test, but when I get there I fail the eye exam. That really annoyed me. The machine was super ghetto, the screen was super dark and all the numbers looked the same. Grrr. At least I get to miss school to go back there.
Oh yeah, before I start, I want to mention UFC 97. That sucka was tight. I don't care what other people are saying, I was really impressed. Every single fight on the card was a good one. My boy Cheick Kongo pulled it off. He kicked the hell out of that scary Dutch guy with a broken hand an all. Also poor Chuck Liddell. He's like the knockout king now. Sammy Stout represented well. That was a beast fight. Too bad Thales Leites was such a weiner though. That whole 'I'm on the ground, come get me' thing was quite lame. I enjoyed watching Silva go to town on his punk oshiri. Anderson Silva is so BA. I could tell when he started to get angry. He got super vicious. I like his style, wailing on that lead leg and all. He reminds me of Andy Chung. He has that mentality that says 'If you're not going to let me beat you straight up, then I'm just going to break my foot up in your ass'. That one kick where he stepped behind his own leg was pretty cool. People are criticizing Anderson Silva, but I understand where he's coming from. The mindset you need for MMA is similar to wrestling. Silva was just out there having fun beating the stuffing out of a fishcake opponent. I blame Leites for being such a pushover. The way I see it, there simply isn't enough competition in the Middleweight division. Silva is too good. I hope Bisping beats Hendo at UFC 100 so Silva can whoop some respect into that big dumb head of his. Yikes. This is what you call rambling. I'll skip ahead now.
So now that there is no more wrestling, I'm playing lacrosse. For those of you who don't know what lacrosse is, its like hockey but with a stick with a basket on the end. Its super fun. The entire team goes to Iolani and almost all of them are seniors. Brandon, Joey (aka Angelo Papoli), and Matt kind of carry the team. Nik Snitsky and I are new so our stick skills aren't really that great. We're the defensive specialists. I actually play midfield, which means I play offense and defense but I sub out when we have the ball. So basically, my job is to smash people. Oh, and piss people off. I'm kind of like our teams Bruce Bowen. Or a dirtier Raja Bell. If you don't know basketball, then I'm our team's Ronde Barber. The shutdown corner. Okay this is getting out of hand. I just really enjoy smashing people. Once I had to guard this 250 pound guy. That wasn't fun. Actually it was fun. He got super annoyed.
This weekend our team played Kapolei. We were super short handed. Super. We were missing 2/3 of our attack. One of our starting middies came straight from the airport. One of our offensive middies had two soccer games in the morning. Despite this, we beat the tar out of Kapolei 12-3 or something like that. I even scored a goal. Even better, I got to do a whole butt load of smashing. Nik and I had a contest to see who could smash the most people. I won easily. This one guy was being a real d bag. He cross checked me in the first quarter, but the ref didn't throw the flag. That made me a bit peeved. Then in the third quarter, Kapolei gave up and decided to play like fagits. The same guy (I need to mention that he was a long pole defenseman, and that he was really short and very wide. He wasn't fat. Just wide. He looked like Blake mixed with a refrigerator) grabbed the ball and smashed Craig Yugawa. Of course I had to smash him back. I knocked him down (it was a clean hit) and then, because i was so amped up, growled at him. I probably shouldn't have done that, but it kind of just came out. I wasn't angry or anything, just really amped. Like Mr. Amphere. Anyhoo, d baggety then decides to get up and retaliate. After the play (see I knocked the ball out of his stick when I hit him and it rolled out of bounds) he runs up and tries to smash me. Now, I'm like a head taller than him, but he's probably at least twenty pounds heavier than me. So I have a feeling this guy is a football player and thinks he's a bad sucka trucka. So he hits me right under my helmet. Now sucks for him because 1. I didn't even fall over and 2. he got a penalty. After the game though, Lauren Kimbo Slice pointed out that I had this big red spot on the side of my neck. It looked kind of like a hickey. I thought that was funny. Yeah. I like lacrosse. Wow that was a really long story. Mr. Kohara, do you actually read all of this? Anyway I'll cut to the proverbial chase now. Its physics time now baby.
The picture above is from the two weeks ago. I think its our game against Mililani. Mr. Linsky came to the game and took photos. I couldn't copy, paste, from his website so I had to buy them. The pictures came out nice actually. They look dusty because I had to scan them. We won by the way. So there are really only a few basic skills in lacrosse: passing, catching, scooping and dodging. It takes a while to get used to the stick. The stick. Direct your attention to the first picture. The first picture is not actually me. There weren't any really good pictures of me shooting or passing because I was so busy smashing guys. Thats actually Angelo Papoli, you might know him as Joe Durso. He's actually really good at lacrosse. He plans to play in college. Notice the way he holds the stick to shoot it. The stick is nice and high. His left hand is all the way at the ass of the stick. His power hand is nice and low also. To shoot, Papoli needs to provide a torque on the ball. Now a lacrosse stick is a perfect example of torque because the butt acts as the axis of rotation and the shaft is the lever arm. Angelo pulls out with his bottom hand and whips it down with his top hand. This sends the head of the stick moving in an arc. The ball travels tangent to the arc of the head as gravity pulls it out of the pocket on the way down. The best shots are down in the ground in front of the goalie's feet. He can't tell where it will bounce and its hard to get his stick down there.
The other two pictures are what I like to do best; smashing. Boom boom pow! Oh gosh, I hate that song. Don't get me started on the music industry... Any way, I bought these pictures because I thought they were cool. These are really good action shots. Too bad his elbow is flying into my face. Actually, this is one of my junker hits. I got this really tall Punahou guy really good on a clear. A clear is when the defense makes a stop and has to move the ball to their offensive zone. You can pass it over, but that's hard. Usually a long pole just runs it over though. Defending a clear is called riding. I love rides. I can just come out of nowhere and clean people out, especially when they are near the sidelines. When I hit the guy in the picture (actually the Punahou guy too), he was near the sideline and the ball came loose and rolled out of bounds. We got the ball back. Oh, so back to what I was saying earlier. The picture looks cool, but it is actually physics. What you are seeing is a bouncy collision. Notice how I go nowhere, but the other guy goes flying. In this example, the collision is an inelastic collision because the kinetic energy is changed after the collision. Momentum is conserved, but some energy is changed to heat and stuff like that. To show that momentum is conserved we have the formula: m1v1 + m2v2 = m1v1f + m2v2f. Its really fun demonstrating good physics. Oh snickelfritz, this is might be my longest one yet. So I guess I'll end it abruptly before it gets too crazy.
P.S. I have a feeling that you think that I'm some kind of sadistic madman after reading this journal. The truth is I just like sports. I might be a little over competetive sometimes. But I do play under control. I try not to clean out the little people. Generally I only really go after people that get physical first. Most of my aggresiveness is in retaliation. I only go monkey nuts on the people that I have to guard, especially if they are good. I like to frustrate them. Oh and on clears. I love clears. Other than than I play nice and respectfully. I'm as chill as a cucumber out there. Hitting is just more fun to me than scoring goals. Ok peace out.
P.P.S. This is officially the longest journal ever. I mean eeeever. For those of you who don't know that's a Chris Jericho reference right there. I did a word count and there are over 1,800 words in this entry. Not including the title. To be exact, there are 1804 words in this entry. It takes up more than 6 pages in manuscript form. That's Times New Roman, 12 pt, double spaced. Not including the pictures. That is insane.

Here we go: So once again, I am reverting back to my old habits. It is now 11 o'clock and I am just starting my physics journal. Stupid YouTube. Anyway, I'm going to try to keep the extraneous comments and details to a minimum this time. It was kind of embarrassing to see how much rambling I did in the last journal. Although, I'm still pissed that Keith Jardine lost to stupid Rampage Jackson. This weekend was a good weekend, but there isn't really that much to share this time. Friday was my sister's birthday so we went to the Cheesecake Factory. My favorite, Yay! I had the Steak Diane and Chicken Madeira combo and for dessert, the Dulce de Leche cheese cake. I was kind of pissed because they discontinued the Tres Leches. That one was pretty yummy. I think I've tried over half of the cheesecakes on the menu so far. My favorite is either the Dutch Apple Caramel Streusel or the Chocolate Tuxedo Cream. Oh so good. The secret to eating cheesecake is to use half bites. You take a piece of cheesecake on your fork, but you only put half of it in your mouth. This helps you savor the cheesecake. If anyone wants the cheesecake eating lesson, I'll be happy to help. Believe me that bugga will explode in your mouth. Yikes I'm getting off topic. I'll talk about the physics now.
So as you can see, the theme of my journal is pro wrestling. I wanted to do it about lacrosse, but the pictures I ordered come in the mail. I tried to copy and paste but it didn't work. Actually I had a very lacrossey weekend. Friday after dinner we had a lacrosse sleepover at Matt's house that carried into Saturday, and Sunday we had a game. We beat Mililani 5-1 by the way. I'm pretty happy. I got to smash some people. The thing that annoyed me though was that this ass clown on the other team thought he was the flipping show because he knocked up the smallest guy on our team. He thought it was the coolest thing that he got to sit in the penalty box for being a douche bag. The worst thing was that we couldn't get our retribution because he didn't play the rest of the game. People like that piss me off. Gosh! I went on another tangent. Dang!
So back to the videos. We filmed these videos over the course of two days across the street at club 100. We had wrestling practice there because Keiko was training for nationals. This was supposed to be an audition video for the variety show. I compiled the clips into an actual wrestling match. I'll try to upload it on to this journal at the end. Hopefully it'll work. So the video is of me and Nik Streng wrestling. In this scene Nik starts off with a back suplex. He transitions to a European uppercut and finishes with a super kick. The second video is Truong doing the Angle slam on Nik Streng aka Nik Snitsky. Yeah, that one is cool! The third video is Truong doing a German Suplex on Nik the Snitsky. Its pretty funny when Truong beats the crap out of Nik. The last video is Nik doing the Batista Bomb on me and failing. He kinda just dropped me. That hurt like hell. After that bedlam ensues.
Now as you can see, Pro wrestling is all about bodies in motion. When ever you have this much lifting, slamming, and falling physics must be involved. The video that I'm going to analyze is video three, the German suplex. That one is the coolest. So there is a lot going on here. Shucks, kinematics were from the first semester. I'm going to have to think nice and hard about what is going on. The first thing that you notice in the video is that Nik is big and Truong is not. That sucks for Truong. The first thing that anyone thinks of when they talk about physics is Newton's laws. This applies in our previously stated situation. You see Newton's first law states that an object at rest stays at rest until a net force acts upon it. This sucks for Truong because he is the one who has to supply that force. This especially sucks because Nik is so big. He has a lot of inertia or mass. Mass determines how much an object will resist a change in velocity. Because Nik is so big, he resists Truongs attempts to fly him into the mat. Actually because Truong is trying to induce an angular acceleration on Nik, the force is a torque. Because its a torque we can say that Nik has a very large moment of inertia, but we'll get into that later. The second thing I wanted to say is about Newton's third law: To any action there is always an equal and opposite reaction. Look at the end of the video. Notice how Nik just seems to bounce off of the mat. This is because when he comes crashing down on and hits the mat, the mat hits him back. Fascinating.
Okay so now to talk about torque. This will definitely not be a stroll in the park. Um so this is hard to explain because Truong is throwing Nik. It isn't as simple as pulling with a rope or something. Torque is a force that causes rotation. In the video we can clearly see that Nik's body goes flying in a uniform circular motion. So in this situation it is hard because the lever arm is not clearly defined. Lets arbitrarily say that he is throwing Nik's torso and that the head and neck act as the lever arm. This makes sense because Nik's body is pivoting around his head, which Truong holds onto the whole time. Again, this is very hard for Truong because of Nik's very high moment of inertia. Moment of inertia is a function of the lever arm squared times the object's mass. Nik is very heavy and the lever arm is short. This shows you just how strong the Vu is. Wow.
Lastly, I'd just like to point out one more thing. I noticed that Nik is leaning way forward before Truong throws him. His big fat head is way over his legs. In physics language we can say that Nik's center of mass is over his support base. Nik has no defense against Truong's suplex. If Truong wasn't there, Nik would probably fall on his face. Okay too much physics. I'm tired. I just gotta say one more thing though. After actually doing these moves and trying to make a video, you gain a lot more respect for these WWE wrestlers. This stuff is sore and it is super hard to do right. On top of that, these guys have to make everything interesting and believable. Doing these moves with a straight face proved to be impossible for us. So below is the final product. I really hope you like it. Okay, enjoy. Peace.