Volleyball is a sport that plays on teamwork, movement, hand eye coordination, and endurance. Not only is it important to hit a ball back and forth over a net, without the team working as a single unit the same is sure to be lost. Congruency is necessary among the team players and their techniques. It was in 1665 that the young Isaac Newton retreated to the family farm at Lincolnshire to escape an outbreak of the plague at Cambridge University, where he was attending classes as an undergraduate. While in his temporary self-imposed exile, Newton began to think about the nature of space and time and motion. Over the course of the next 2 years, this young man, who had not been a particularly impressive student at college, constructed a magnificent intellectual edifice, offering the world a vision of a universe governed by immutable physical laws. Specifically Newton's three laws of motion (e.g., "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.") and his law of universal gravitation (which was inspired by his being hit on the head by a falling apple). In doing so, Newton created the field of classical mechanics and posited a universe in which space and time were absolute and the cosmos itself was thought to be akin to a gigantic watch spring wound up by the hand of God. (Weaver 4)

This leads to the views of the motion in volleyball in several ways. If it...

This interaction sends the ball in a positive force to the other side of the net, which in turn evokes an equal reaction of an opponent attempting in turn to hit the ball back over the net.
A stationary object when struck will move only if the force applied to it is of sufficient magnitude to overcome its inertia (Newton's First Law of Motion). The force must be great enough to overcome not only the inertia, due to the object's weight and speed but also all restraining forces (friction, air resistance, etc.) as well. The law of conservation of momentum states that when two or more objects collide with each other, momentum is conserved. The total momentum after the impact is equal to the total momentum before the impact. (Broer 224)

Works Cited

Broer, Marion R. Efficiency of Human Movement. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1966.

Mitchell, Elmer D., and Bernard S. Mason. The Theory of Play. New York a.S. Barnes, 1934.

Oglesby, Carole a., et al., eds. Encyclopedia of Women and Sport in America. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1998.

Weaver, Jefferson Hane. Conquering Calculus: The Easy Road to Understanding Mathematics. New York: Plenum Press, 1998.