Height of Stick-It Serve
By William Shoeworth III

Baseball has the mile per hour gauge for pitches. Football has the hang time gauge for punts. Now, the IMSA sport Stick It to the Man With a Fine Roll of Duct Tape has it's own useless, measurable stat, serve height. To understand serve height, one must first understand the game Stick-It. This game involves two contestants with 2 feet long or longer sticks serving a 133-gram roll of duct tape to each other. The object of the game is to try to ring the airborne roll of duct tape around your stick, which gets you 5 points. It is also possible for the server to get 3 points by getting the roll of duct tape to land in bounds and then having it bounce out. For both of these reasons, one would want to get the most height on their serve while still managing to keep it in bounds. The advantages of this being that the higher the serve gets, the higher the speed will be when it is able to be stuck, thus making it harder to catch with the stick. This is wherein the skill in the game lies; being able to serve the high serves while still managing to keep them in bounds and being able to stick a serve that comes down extremely fast.

To find the height of the serves, all one needs is a stopwatch to time how long the serve is airborne. After the time is measured, one would plug the recorded time into the formula Y=1/2*9.8*(T/2) 2. I served 5 times are recorded the following data:

Serve	Time (s)	Height of Serve (m)
#1	2.23	6.09
#2	2.05	5.15
#3	2.14	5.61
#4	2.19	5.88
#5	2.47	7.47

Now, according to this, my average serve height is just above 6 meters, and I am currently ranked as the 2nd best player on campus. I believe that if one were to take the average serve heights of all the players, the higher ranked people would have a higher average serve height than the lower ranked people, but further research is required in this field. This research could lead the way to a new system of the statistics keeping of the sport, and give the game a new way of calculating the odds of the winner or loser of a game besides their ladder position.