Have you ever played basketball as a kid or as a teenager? If so, you must have run laps around the court on your feet. Basketball practice can include it as punishment or as a warm-up for young players.
Playing basketball involves a lot of running, especially with a full-court ball. It was necessary to run laps around the court in order to develop stamina and get us into shape. By combining all of those running drills with defensive and shooting drills, players’ stamina will be improved in-game even more.
What is the real number of laps needed to complete a mile on a tennis court? I used to think about that when I’m running, but I never stopped to count it out. This is quite easy to calculate, but first, let’s check out the quick answer.
Then, we can discuss whether or not there are differences between the youth, high school, and college courts, as well as the National Basketball Association.
Quick Answer
If you were running laps in high school, the court size required approximately 19 laps to finish a mile. That half-mile you ran because you were late to practice probably amounted to 20 laps.
Having played basketball for many years, I’ve run a lot of laps around the court, but I have come across a funny coaching story.
During my coaching of my daughter’s rec league team, I never made the players warm up by running laps, except in the case that they were late. During one particular practice season, there was a young woman who committed a pattern of lateness.
This young lady always showed up right as we were completing our warm-up laps. She was also my daughter’s friend. My daughter struggled to explain what was wrong with her, so I asked her if she could find out what was wrong. Perhaps she needed a ride to practice.
My immediate suspicion was that the player had purposely shown up late to practice so as to avoid running laps. Actually, she had her mother bring her out to eat so she could miss warm-up laps and be late for practice. Without a doubt, her mother had no problem with her daughter skipping warm-up laps.
I changed up how I practiced after I discovered what was going on; we played games like HORSE, knock out, and 21 in the beginning. At the moment she arrived I would stop the game and tell her I am here and we can start running warm-up laps.
She got to practice on time as a consequence, and we went back to doing warmups as usual. We would run five laps, probably about one and a half miles.
The number of laps in a mile can be calculated by using the formula below.
To confirm that 19.7 laps around a high school size basketball court equal one mile, let’s return to the discussion about how many laps make up a mile. It’s a simple calculation. So, you might wonder how we got that number. Let’s go into the details.
Calculating the perimeter of a basketball court is the key to finding out if your team won. If you don’t know what perimeter is, don’t worry, many of us haven’t seen the 6th-grade in a while, so we’ll make up for it (no quiz at the end).
You can figure out the perimeter of a basketball court based on its length and width. Here’s the formula:
Perimeter = 2 x Length + 2 x Width
Or for short
P = 2L +2W
Since the perimeter is being measured in feet, the mile must be converted into feet as well.
1 Mile = 5280 feet.
Based on dividing the radius of a court by the number of feet in a mile, the equation results.
Taking 5280/P is the same as taking 5280/(2L+2W).
For the standard highschool court that measures 84 feet long and 50 feet wide, we can plug in as follows:
Laps per mile = 5280/(2×84 + 2×50)
= 5280/(168+100)
= 5280/268
= 19.7 laps
It might have been important to remember perimeter calculations and complete some simple division, but basketball courts for various levels of play have some important differences. We now know how to calculate laps per mile, so let’s move on to examine other courts’ laps per mile.
In the case of other courts, the miles per lap
Here are some other law courts’ dimensions. They can all be used to determine the number of laps a court will take if it has the same measurements as a US College and NBA court.
College/NBA
Length = 94 ft.
Width = 50 ft.
Laps per mile = 5280/(2×94 + 2×50) = 18.33
High school
Length = 84 ft.
Width = 50 ft.
The laps per mile equal 5280/(284 + 250) = 19.7
High school juniors
Length = 74 ft.
Width = 42 ft.
Laps per mile = 5280/(2×74 + 2×42) = 23.2
In FIBA/Olympic we convert meters into feet
Length = 28m = 91.9 ft.
Width = 15m = 49.2 ft.
Laps per mile = 5280/(2×91.9 + 2×49.2) = 18.6
You may find other sized courts on school campuses and in exercise gyms. We can’t be sure how long they are or how wide they are because they are probably not standard in size. Once you have determined how many laps you will need for a mile, you only have to calculate the length and width of the track.
Conclusion
You can calculate your required number of laps in a mile once you know how long and wide the stadium or any other area you are going to run around is. In your driveway or backyard, you can calculate how many laps you need to run to accomplish a mile.
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