There are 2 major pieces of the final product – one is the sript and the other are slides that go along with it.

Writing the script was difficult because I had to incorporate all of my sub questions while staying in the 6 minute timeframe – – I had too much to say and had to make hard choices around when to keep in and what to cut out.  I learned that the first draft is never the final draft – you must go through and edit.  The script took about 1.5 weeks to complete – my final version is very different than my first draft.

The slides were easier to complete, the pictures have to relate to the script for that slide.  I added the images to my slide show from Google.  I think that if a visual is good then it will help convey the mesasge I am trying to say.   Finding images was pretty simple but there were a lot of images to choose from – I had to carefully pick the ones that first best with my script.

Once all of the my material were finished I had to practice, practice, practice.  I practiced in school with my friends and at home with my parents.  It is a lot of hard work and I still need to keep memorzing my script.  I am still working on this part but I think I will be done and ready by the time I have to present.

Answering my main inquiry question was fun but challenging.

It fun because doing research led me to think about my topic in different ways.  For example ton cool facts  like I didn’t realize that the total number of home runs during the Steriod Era 4,782 or that 10.2% of players hit more that 40 home runs in  a single season. It was challenging because I was able to gather lots of information from my research, interviews and site visit, but it was hard to pull all the information together into a couple of meaningful paragraphs.

My main inquiry question is, How does performance enhancing drugs or (PEDs ) affect player performance in sports? In order to answer this question I needed to do the following: online research, 2 interveiws, and a site visit. All of these components helped in different ways for example my research helped me with gathering facts and my interviews helped  me with getting information that I could not get to online or that wasn’t publically available, and my site visit also helped me visualize some of the information I had been reading about.

For my Capstone site visit I went to Yankee Stadium.  I am lucky to have a cousin who works for the Yankees in Operations and he was able to give me and Ravi (my friend) a tour.

I learned that all drug testing in the training facilities and each player is random picked to testing by the league – – it is not team a decision.  The workout and training facitities have just be redone with all new equipment and it cost millions of dollors. The gym areas is 1000 sq ft training area 500 sq ft. All the workout and training facilities are right behind the dugout.  I also had the oppurtinity to sit in the dugout, stood in the on deck circle and walked on the field — It was super COOL!

I had a really good time at Yankee Stadium and know it will help me finish my project.

On May 26th I had the opportunity to interview the former porfessional NY Mets player and now dcommentator Nelso Figueroa by phone.

We spoke for approximately 30 minutes, he was super friendly and very helpful.  I learned a lot about PED and his experience in the MLB during the steriod era (1993-2001).  Some of the things are learned were:  1) new ways the MBL could prevent players from using 2) that he thinks PED’s make good player great, but that they don’t make a bad player great. In other words if I don’t normally pla ybaseball taking PEDs won’t make me a superstar. 3) Balls and bats are more juices now than the players – they are designed for harder hit balls resulting home runs. Continue reading →

We had to come to final decision of what we wanted our main inquiry question and sub questions to be. First we wrote  down a ton of possible main inquiry questions like this:   We choose from one of these main inquiry questions that we wrote in our notebook, and I later discovered that I needed sub questions to go in line with my main inquiry question. So, first I started thinking of ideas that were related to my main inquiry question. Then I formed those ideas into questions to go with my main inquiry question. Now we are getting a little further into my capstone project.