How to calculate bowling speed?
If you are a fan of cricket and especially if you are a bowler, you must have wondered what fancy gadgetry is involved in calculating a bowler’s speed?
Well, The good news is you don’t need fancy gadgetry to get an approximation of your bowling speed! All you need is a smartphone and some basic 5th Standard physics.
Speed = Distance / Time
The speed of the ball is just the distance it covers divided by the time it takes. A cricket pitch is 22 yards (around 20 meters from stump to stump), but the distance between the crease (from which the bowler releases the ball to the crease where it will meet the bat) is around 2.5 meters shorter. So…
Distance = 17.5 meters.
Calculating the time taken is a little more tricky. You could use a stopwatch to time the ball leaving the bowlers grip to it hitting the wood of the bat or whizzing past it, but why use such antiques when slow mo videos can be captured in cheap smartphones.
Use any app that gives you millisecond precision level in timing and you will be fine. I use Video Stopwatch ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.secondscount) to get very precise times.
Time (t) = time of video still at which ball leaves the bowlers hand / time of video still at which ball reaches batsman
Now that you have the distance and time, let’s get speed!
Speed = 17.5/t (in meters / second)
i.e.. Speed = 17.5/t* (3600/1000) (in km/hr)
Speed = 63 / t (in km/hr)
Viola!! We have our formula ready! Now let’s plug it in with different values of Time to see what it looks like:
0.45 seconds is all a batsman gets to play a in-swinging delivery from Glenn McGrath!
