I Used Math To Make the Highschool Football Team

Kinetic energy works, even for a skinny theater nerd

The title probably has you thinking about the movie Moneyball, or maybe you thought about the girl who used math to win a figure skating competition. She was so smart, she could calculate trajectories and figure out the best angles and timing or something.

I assure you, this is quite unlike that story. I’m not that kind of smart. This is the story of how I used my basic understanding of a single mathematical formula to make the highschool football team. In short, I knew a single fact that escaped the other players.

That fact is the formula for kinetic energy, pictured above.

There are actually a bunch of different formulas for kinetic energy, but this is the one for rigid, non-rotating bodies. Humans are usually rigid non-rotating bodies… even when they’re playing football.

To put that formula into words, kinetic energy (Ek) is equal to HALF (0.5) of a body’s mass (m) multiplied by THE SQUARE of its speed (v2).

In case you forgot even more from math class than me, a number’s square is the product of a number multiplied by itself.

In other words… you know what? I’ll finish explaining later on.