Jordan Pitt and Dr. Matthew Seeley, Department of Exercise Science

This project has not yet been completed due mostly to complications with the tools needed to make the measurements. We intend on completing this project and still feel that there will be opportunities to present or publish our findings. In fact, we have written one abstract with some of our preliminary findings and submitted it to the National Athletic Trainers Association, with the intent to present our findings at their national conference next year.

Because of the delays we have experienced, we have been able to expand and improve this project so that in the end we will be able to obtain more reliable data than we would have, had we not experienced the issues we did.

There were two other students who applied for ORCA grants to look at other variables during the data collection we had planned. After they did not receive grants we decided to come together to look at many variables together. We made adjustments to our procedures and received approval for those changes from the IRB committee. We felt that the adjustments made would enable us to get the best results. One of the biggest changes came as we discovered that the sizes of boxes we had picked for the subjects to jump over were not appropriate for subjects of varying heights and strengths. After much thought we found a way to build a device that would allow us to adjust the jump heights based on the maximum jump height of each individual subject. This was an important change that has made our results more reliable.

We were ready to begin data collection in January of this year as planned but two of the high speed infrared video cameras used to track the subjects’ motion began having serious issues and needed to be sent back to the manufacturers for repair. We could not begin our project until they were fixed which didn’t occur until March. During that time however, a decision was made to upgrade the force platforms and the computers in the Biomechanics Lab. This caused us to have to make some more small adjustments and prohibited us from starting data collection until May. After finally completing our data collection, we began preparing all the data for analysis. During this time, however, the validity of our data came in to question when another of the Exercise Science Professors suspected that the new force platforms had been incorrectly configured. This put us on hold until that issue was resolved and we could ensure that our data was valid, which it is. Consequently, we are still in the process of preparing our data for analysis.

A small amount of force data was able to be analyzed in attempts to stay somewhat on schedule with the plan to submit an abstract in November. We have not analyzed enough data to be able to know if our hypotheses were correct but we were able to discover some interesting results and trends that we didn’t necessarily expect.