Amazed there aren't more broken fingers - this photo

[tomclen]

This freeze frame from Texas/Creighton regional final.

It's amazing (IMO) there aren't more broken fingers/sprains/agony.

[volleyfan24]

There probably are I have played in a rec league this guy went on the RS for a hit and I got fingers on the ball my block was late and he hit the ball so hard my fingers were sore for about 48 hours after.

[Wolfgang]

I brought up this topic only a few months ago.

volleytalk.proboards.com/thread/65321/understand-volleyball

[Deleted]

Dec 11, 2016 1:30:53 GMT -5 tomclen said:

This freeze frame from Texas/Creighton regional final.

It's amazing (IMO) there aren't more broken fingers/sprains/agony.

That's BYU's Whitney Young-Howard. When did she start playing for Creighton? And why didn't she put on the Creighton jersey? Speaking of illegal uniforms....

[Deleted]

[Deleted]

Dec 11, 2016 1:37:34 GMT -5 Wolfgang said:

I brought up this topic only a few months ago.

volleytalk.net/thread/65321/understand-volleyball

So you know what this is.

[mplssetter]

Just put some tape on it.

[sunsuphornsup]

Dec 11, 2016 1:30:53 GMT -5 tomclen said:

This freeze frame from Texas/Creighton regional final.

It's amazing (IMO) there aren't more broken fingers/sprains/agony.

So no touch on that ball, right?

[Wiswell]

I saw that same vido and was amazed and now you tell me it was from a different match?

[tomclen]

Dec 11, 2016 8:39:40 GMT -5 Wiswell said:

I saw that same vido and was amazed and now you tell me it was from a different match?

I took the screen grab from the Texas/Creighton broadcast...but as was pointed out above, it was a replayed shot from the Texas/BYU match

[redcard🏐]

That ball looks deflated.... BYU should protest!

[durtpile]

Dec 11, 2016 1:37:34 GMT -5 Wolfgang said:

I brought up this topic only a few months ago.

volleytalk.net/thread/65321/understand-volleyball

The consensus at the time - from all the self-proclaimed experts - was that it didn't hurt.  Not even a little bit, because the ball is only traveling 80 mph, and in slow motion it isn't even that fast.

None of them ever explained why the girls always have a grimace on their face and their eyes screwed shut.

[Gilmoy]

Actually, that photo shows exactly why fingers (usually) don't break: the air-filled ball deforms instead.  Scroll the high-speed video back a few hundred frames, and you'd see that the ball deformed under Nwanebu's spiking hand to almost the same depth.  That amount of deformation happens on every top-level hit, block touch, dig, facial , and line bounce.[1]

The way I understand it, the total energy carried by a volleyball can only be that which was imparted by cupped fingers (+ bases-of-fingers -- but usually not palms), and so it's necessarily less than the tensile strength of the fingers.  Hence, whatever fingers did by pushing forward into the ball, cannot thereafter bend fingers backward.  In principle, the blocker "counter-spikes" and pushes her fingers into the ball.  The exceptional case is that a grazing shot could concentrate all of the ball's energy onto one finger, and 4 fingers could overpower 1, which is a risk we all take.  That probably explains why blocking finger injuries are relatively rare: it's proportional to the surface area of those tiny zones of ball-vs-1-finger contact points, divided by the total area of the blocking surface.  (Good thing the blocker had all that tape as extra support.)

In my experience, it's far more dangerous to point a finger (or my left thumb ) directly at the ball, because then all the force goes down your pipe-like bone into a joint, which thereafter must dissipate it via rotations or socket-hopping   (My thumb didn't break, it just rotated 90 degrees backward in the joint and stayed there.  ER doctor looked at my X-ray for a minute, had an orderly help hold me down, and ... rotated it back.  A non-invasive outpatient procedure, so there's that.  I was blocking normally vs. a left-side hit that was wide-and-tight, so the ball came at me from an unusual vector that just happened to be antiparallel to my left thumb's vector.  Durn Brasilians, getting there and spiking hard when an American would just punch with a fist.  This suggests a rule of thumb for blocking: rotate hands/fingers away from the actual line-of-sight vector to the ball.)

[1] In fact, this deformation is why everybody in the gym can clearly see that a ball bounced "out", yet FIVB Hawkeye replay will rule it in. It's not an illusion, and we're not all wrong: at the instant of the ball's tangential contact with the floor, the vertical axis of the ball, and therefore its first infinitesimal contact point, is indeed out-of-bounds. But the ball squashes down until it's as wide as a pie dish, and so its footprint expands sideways and engulfs the line, and by rule that's "in". That's why Hawkeye replay shows every bounce as a full circle or stretched ellipse, not a point. Same rule in beach: the compressed ball can make the rope wiggle. Human eyes, with our low flicker fusion rate, cannot see the ball compress-and-rebound (n.b. a gyrfalcon probably could), so we interpolate the center-of-mass of the ball's trajectory, and we can pretty accurately judge that relative to a sideline -- but that's only a loose approximation to the written rule. Corollary: I think some line judges have been specifically trained in this, and they know (from past video reviews) that the ball compresses, and thus a bounce that is clearly center-is-out by a few inches is actually "in-by-squish". So they call those in, and we howl. But actually, (mutter mutter) they're right!  We have such a line judge in the PNW who works a few of WSU's matches per year, and we've bayed so much at her that now we just laugh at opposing coaches and traveling fans when they get all het up and howl at her for the same thing.

[tomclen]

^ Only part of this I understand are the little yellow faces.

[durtpile]

Dec 11, 2016 16:29:31 GMT -5 Gilmoy said:

Actually, that photo shows exactly why fingers (usually) don't break: the air-filled ball deforms instead.  Scroll the high-speed video back a few hundred frames, and you'd see that the ball deformed under Nwanebu's spiking hand to almost the same depth.  That amount of deformation happens on every top-level hit, block touch, dig, facial , and line bounce.[1]

The way I understand it, the total energy carried by a volleyball can only be that which was imparted by cupped fingers (+ bases-of-fingers -- but usually not palms), and so it's necessarily less than the tensile strength of the fingers.  Hence, whatever fingers did by pushing forward into the ball, cannot thereafter bend fingers backward.  In principle, the blocker "counter-spikes" and pushes her fingers into the ball.  The exceptional case is that a grazing shot could concentrate all of the ball's energy onto one finger, and 4 fingers could overpower 1, which is a risk we all take.  That probably explains why blocking finger injuries are relatively rare: it's proportional to the surface area of those tiny zones of ball-vs-1-finger contact points, divided by the total area of the blocking surface.  (Good thing the blocker had all that tape as extra support.)

In my experience, it's far more dangerous to point a finger (or my left thumb ) directly at the ball, because then all the force goes down your pipe-like bone into a joint, which thereafter must dissipate it via rotations or socket-hopping   (My thumb didn't break, it just rotated 90 degrees backward in the joint and stayed there.  ER doctor looked at my X-ray for a minute, had an orderly help hold me down, and ... rotated it back.  A non-invasive outpatient procedure, so there's that.  I was blocking normally vs. a left-side hit that was wide-and-tight, so the ball came at me from an unusual vector that just happened to be antiparallel to my left thumb's vector.  Durn Brasilians, getting there and spiking hard when an American would just punch with a fist.  This suggests a rule of thumb for blocking: rotate hands/fingers away from the actual line-of-sight vector to the ball.)

[1] In fact, this deformation is why everybody in the gym can clearly see that a ball bounced "out", yet FIVB Hawkeye replay will rule it in. It's not an illusion, and we're not all wrong: at the instant of the ball's tangential contact with the floor, the vertical axis of the ball, and therefore its first infinitesimal contact point, is indeed out-of-bounds. But the ball squashes down until it's as wide as a pie dish, and so its footprint expands sideways and engulfs the line, and by rule that's "in". That's why Hawkeye replay shows every bounce as a full circle or stretched ellipse, not a point. Same rule in beach: the compressed ball can make the rope wiggle. Human eyes, with our low flicker fusion rate, cannot see the ball compress-and-rebound (n.b. a gyrfalcon probably could), so we interpolate the center-of-mass of the ball's trajectory, and we can pretty accurately judge that relative to a sideline -- but that's only a loose approximation to the written rule. Corollary: I think some line judges have been specifically trained in this, and they know (from past video reviews) that the ball compresses, and thus a bounce that is clearly center-is-out by a few inches is actually "in-by-squish". So they call those in, and we howl. But actually, (mutter mutter) they're right!  We have such a line judge in the PNW who works a few of WSU's matches per year, and we've bayed so much at her that now we just laugh at opposing coaches and traveling fans when they get all het up and howl at her for the same thing.

Having fingers bent backwards doesn't hurt?  No one ever gets broken fingers? 

Why doesn't the ball deform in those shots to the head that cause concussions?