I have played field hockey my entire life. If you just walked up to a game with no prior knowledge, you would think we all look ridiculous and would be wondering why the whistle blows every other second. Why are they only using one side of the stick? Ten field players, what? Why aren’t they using their bodies? So many questions would be going through your mind, it’s really quiet simple. Keep the ball away from the other team and put it in the net. Don’t use your body and watch your back swing. Newton’s laws of motion can be applied to field hockey.

How hard you hit the ball in certain situations is very important. How far is my teammate from me and how hard do I have to hit it and at what angle are all things we have to think about when delivering a pass efficiently. Newton’s first law is the law of inertia. We have to hit the ball so that it goes a certain distance at a certain efficient speed to get to our teammate. The law states that once an object is moving in a certain direction, it will move in that direction forever, unless acted upon by another source. The ball gets hit by our sticks with all the power we can pull in from our legs and muscles in our bodies and it will only stop if it is picked up by another played who intercepts it or the ground’s friction will slow it to a stop because it wasn’t hit hard enough. The force of the hit determines how far it will go.

The second law of motion is about force. Force is mass x acceleration. The mass in this case would be the size of the ball, which is a little bit smaller than a softball, just about the size of a baseball. The acceleration part comes from when the player hits the ball. The more strength behind the hit, the further it will go. All field hockey balls are made the same so the acceleration depends on the player and how hard they hit it. Therefore, force is different with every player and with different types of hits. Short quick passes don’t need that much force, but long drives down the field need a lot of force.

Equal and opposing forces is the third of Newton’s laws. When a player is dribbling the ball, she is only putting force on the one side of the ball to push it forward. There isn’t anything on the other side of the ball to stop her or to interrupt her dribbling. When another player steps up to defend and disrupt the attacking player from moving forward, once the defender puts her stick on the ball, she is going to put enough force to stop the ball dead and the two players will be stuck in one spot, not moving because they both are putting the same force on either side of the ball. The only way the ball is going to budge after this is if one player stops adding the same amount of force on her side or if one player pulls the ball away and around the other player.

While we are playing, we aren’t actually directly thinking of Newton’s laws, but they are still there. When we are playing, we are thinking that we have to avoid the other players and can’t let them get the ball. We have to use our acceleration and force to get the ball where we want it to be. We have to think about that if we run right into another player, the ball will get stopped and we could possibly loose it. See we aren’t directly thinking about the laws, but we kind of are with our decision making. Newton’s laws play a big part in effective playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_zJg0d7xc8