Measure Ball Speed

This article is a how-to guide detailing a practice or process.

Using video: To accurately find Ball Speed at release, a video is necessary.

Using a frame-by-frame player, such as Quicktime

Place the timeline at the point of release. Write down the Frame Number
Click off the frames 1 by 1 until the ball reaches the 15 foot mark on the lane
Take note of the frame. Subtract this Frame number by the one you had taken at release.

This will give you the number of frames it took for the ball to travel 15 feet.

We use this instead of the whole lane to attempt to take friction, as well as ball motion out of the equation

Multiply this number of frames by 4. This will be the number of frames it would take your ball to reach the headpin.

Now we'll convert the number of frames to seconds.

Take the number of frames and divide it by your frame rate
This will give you the time it took, in seconds from foul line to headpin. 60 feet.

From here, it's back to conversion factors:

(60 feet / X seconds) x (60 Seconds / 1 Minute) x (60 Minutes / 1 Hour) x (1 mile / 5280 feet)

This result will leave us with Miles Per Hour.

Or, you could take 40.909090909 and divide it by the number of seconds. This is the result of the above multiplication.

Video

Video Courtesy of JustinWi