Physics Project For my Physics Project I decided to learn about the physics behind cradling a Lacrosse ball. I also wanted to see what happened when I changed the size, shape, and weight of what I was cradling and how that would affect the result of the level of difficulty and my level of performance. My hypothesis was that cradling objects that were the same size but lighter than a lacrosse ball would make it the easiest to learn how to cradle and improve my performance the most efficiently. For my baseline test I cradled with you guessed it a lacrosse ball, I tested how much effort it took me to cradle with my dominant hand and then how easy it was to switch to my non-dominant. (This is something that you have to be able to do in Lacrosse …show more content…
For example there is centrifugal force which is what is used for the duration of the time that you spend cradling the ball. Centrifugal force is the outward force on a mass when it is rotated which causes it to be more difficult for something to move and change location. An example of this is when you are spinning a bucket of water around on your arm and none of it falls out because you are going so fast.This is because the outside force, which in this case the act of cradling, is applying more pressure on the lacrosse ball from the outside of the net than gravity is causing on the inside of the net which results in the lacrosse ball staying inside of the net of the lacrosse stick. Newton's first Law of Inertia is put into play because when you have control of the ball the only thing that can change that is either a change of gravity that can be caused by the lack of centrifugal force due to lack of cradling, or another force which in this case would happen to be another player that is applying pressure to you changing your force and affect the force on the ball. One of the other examples of physics that is used in lacrosse is momentum, momentum plays an important role in lacrosse because without it we wouldn’t be able to pass, shoot, or catch the ball. The way that we change the momentum when we are playing is by the amount of push and pull that we use on our sticks, this causes how much energy is transferred into the head of our lacrosse sticks which then turns into velocity and the more momentum we have the high velocity we put into our passes, catches, and