As anyone who has ever entered a stadium or looked at the scoreboard knows – sports are made of math. From the stats overlaying ESPN™ to the final score of a game, a sport without stats is like a bike without wheels (which is to say, useless) (or at least not competitive). Math is so integral to sports that many have argued the dominance of one sport over the other based off these numbers. And with good reason: science is everywhere in sports – in the physics of the ball play, the capabilities and limitations of athletes, how their diets, their training, their calories burned and weight gained play into their averages and records; and, of course, one cannot forget the size of their fan bases. Let’s face it: sports is a science.
As with any other science, the history of sports involves evolution and innovation – the presence or absence of which can determine a sports survival. This may seem like a ludicrous assumption based on stats surrounding mainstream sports that have not changed for years (such as the current twitter following of Cristiano Ronaldo (40.1 million) and virtual attendance to last years Super Bowl). However, the sad truth is youth participation in mainstream sports has diminished over the years and efforts to reverse this trend have been largely ineffective.
Enter Bubbleball. Largely regarded and implemented as an innovation in soccer equipment, bubbleball represents the future of sports as evidenced by the numbers.
- 0% mortality rate. Only 1 in 100 players report any injury at all (and injury here includes skinned knees, sprained ankles, and similar minor hazards of all physical movement)
- It burns 20% more calories than soccer without a bubbleball and 50% more than running alone.
- Interest in bubbleball from its first summer in the United States to the second rose 3400%.
And it’s only just begun. A new piece of equipment merits a new sport entirely. It’s only a matter of time before the innovator athletes pick up the charge and take to the field. It’s 2016. Isn’t it time we stopped telling athletes to imagine being the ball and let them actually do it?
Welcome to sports history folks. It’s gonna be a bubbly ride.