Hi Team, great to see you here. We have a problem, and I need your help investigating the solution.

The league is introducing a new type of football, and our players have been reporting that the inflation of their football is changing the way that they play. We need to work out what inflation does to the ball, and to help our players find a good amount of inflation for the big game.

In the home changing rooms you should find some balls that have been inflated, can you test which of them have the best bounce? We also want to know if we can help our players out by playing on the astroturf or on a harder surface, can you investigate if this makes a difference?

The drill for this experiment is, hold the ball out at chest level, drop it and count the number of bounces.

We’re looking for clean data, so throwing it at the ground is going to make it hard to see if we’re measuring the strength of your arms or the bounciness of the ball.

We’re going for 5 reps of this drill on each of the inflated balls. Hold the ball out at chest level, drop it and count the number of bounces.

The drill is going to require some teamwork. Someone to drop the ball, some team members to count the number of bounces and someone to write down the score. Let’s work together and find out what the best surface, and best inflation is.

Look, the team left everything out there today. They worked incredibly hard to gather this data, and in the end, that effort really paid off.

What we’ve found is that there’s definitely a relationship between the ball’s pressure and how many times it bounces. On top of that, the surface it hits also plays a huge role in how the ball behaves.

Think of it like this: As soon as you let it go of the ball, gravity takes over, and that energy shifts to movement energy because the ball is now falling. Then, you’ve got the first impact. The ball hits the ground and changes shape slightly. Energy is stored in this squashed shape, but the ball wants to snap back to shape, and that’s when the rebound happens.

But not all the energy goes into the bounce. Some is lost as sound (we hear the bounce), some as heat from friction, and some is lost when the ball is slightly damaged or changed – that’s why balls eventually wear out.

As the ball goes back up, gravity slows it down, and then it starts falling again for the next bounce. But the ball doesn’t bounce forever. Each time it loses a bit of energy, so the bounces get lower and lower.

Now, if we bounce the ball on a soft surface, like astroturf, it doesn’t bounce as much. That’s because both the ball and the ground change shape more, and more energy is lost. This also happens with a ball that isn’t very well inflated – it’s softer and changes shape more easily, so it loses more energy and doesn’t bounce as much.

We also thought about which ball would be best for scoring a penalty. The answer? The hardest, most inflated ball. That’s because a hard ball doesn’t squash as much when you kick it, so more of your energy goes into moving the ball forward.

It’s a great insight for the squad – not just about physics, but about the importance of pressure and conditions. We’ll definitely be taking this into account moving forward.