Matt Smellie
Ticats.ca
Do either of these sound familiar? “A pleasure to teach” or “this student brings a lot of joy to the classrom when he leaves it.”
Yes, it’s report card time, full of reward or childhood anxiety. A new baseball glove or a grounding, depending on where your grades fell on that spectrum of parental expectations.
For CFL prospects, this past weekend’s evaluation camp offered a similar reward or sentence. This year’s crop was put through their paces. How fast can you run? How high can you jump? How much can you bench press? All in an attempt to calculate athleticism and performance. Run a 4.4. forty and you’re guaranteed to get drafted. Put up some marginal results and you could be relegated to the real world, hoping that philosophy degree translates to more than “do you want fries with that?”
This weekend saw two combine records obliterated. Steven Turner of Bishop’s ran a 4.31 forty-yard dash while Michal Montoya of Laurier threw up 225 lbs. 40 times in the bench press. But combine success doesn’t guarantee professional football success. Former bench press record holder J.P. Bekasiak put up 33 reps and has struggled to see the field in Hamilton and Montreal. So is there something else? Is there something beyond the quantitative measures of bench presses and forty times that can indicate football acuity?
Ticats General Manager, Bob O’Billovich understands that combine results aren’t everything and hints at something else.
“Sometimes guys can run fast in a straight line on the clock but they don’t play fast and often times the best players are guys who have the ability to play fast versus the guy who has a great straight line time.”
But what exactly is “plays fast?” The answer may be in the numbers themselves.
You may remember the 1998 psychological thriller, Pi – director Darren Aronofsky’s (The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream) first foray into feature film. Max Cohen, the film’s main character, is a mathematical genius. He is convinced that everything in the world can be understood by numbers, and if those numbers are graphed correctly, patterns will be revealed. Unfortunately for Max, who’s trying to predict the stock market, there’s some other factors that hinder his pursuit. But that’s for you to rent and discover, what’s important is the film’s idea of mathematics is all around us, including football.
A few years ago, then Ticats quarterback Casey Printers spoke at an elementary school math challenge and instead of the status-quo “stay-in-school” speech, Casey related how math affects him as an athlete.
“I’ve learned over the years, that if you can incorporate mathematics into football or into basketball or into any sport that you play, you will be a better athlete. Because all athletics is, is games of angles. If you can create angles, you can understand mathematically how to defeat someone, then you can win.”
And he isn’t alone in his understanding of math and how it plays out in sport. The Great One, Wayne Gretzky had this to say to an interviewer during his hay day as a player.
“People talk about skating, puck-handling, and shooting, but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions.”
Are successful elite athletes, a sane, concise version of Max Cohen, quickly calculating angles, recognizing patterns and using that to their advantage to anticipate the play? Is the separation between a good athlete and a great athlete that cerebral ability to calculate, make a decision and react quickly, hence “playing fast”? Can sport be simply reduced to mathematics?
“Certainly,” says McMaster University Math Professor Fred Hoppe, “if you’re playing billiards.”
However, the professor wasn’t going to make the jump from the pool table to the football field. There is a big difference from calculating the angle of a bank shot with a static nine-ball to calculating the angle of a running back on the run around the corner to beat a 280-pound raging defensive end. But if Printers and Gretzky believe that math has helped them in their athletic pursuits you have to believe them. They appreciate math.
“If you have an early appreciation for math than you are more likely to have an affinity to do well at it,” said Hoppe.
“I was always good at math,” explains Ticats’ centre, Marwan Hage, “I’m still good at math. Math is easy. I always struggled in languages, writing, and reading but math is easy.”
Children who grow up liking math, may pursue it, continuing through high school, university and perhaps, making a career in it. Their understanding of numbers, angles and patterns becomes more extensive. Their ability to calculate becomes faster. How that mathematical mind effects athletic pursuits might not be known, but it’s interesting to note this past year’s Vanier Cup champion Queen’s Gaels.
The 2009 Gaels squad featured everything; a sound running game, a deadly air attack and an aggressive defense. But it also featured a roster where 30% of its players were pursuing math based degress (accounting, economics, engineering and finance). That’s almost twice as much as the closest team in the OUA (16% of the Waterloo Warriors were pursuing similar degrees).
Is this an anomaly? Maybe… but the future could be bright if your child “plays well with numbers.”
