What is the acceleration of a 55.8 kg volleyball when a player uses a force of 0.27 n to spike the ball?

I don't know much about sports, but I'm assuming "spike" means to propel it, energetically, vehemently, and decisively, straight to the ground.

In that case, the ball already has a gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 straight to the ground as soon as it leaves your hand. The player's extra little push gives it a little bit more acceleration.

In this problem, that's not much. First of all, the mass of the ball is 55.8 kg, so the volleyball weighs about 123 pounds ! I would be curious to see the last few seconds of that game, just before the spike.

Now, the force of the push ... 0.27 Newton. That's a shade less than 1 ounce of force ... which makes perfect sense to me, since the player is obviously exhausted after struggling through an entire game with a 123-lb ball.

But hey ! My job here is just to play the hand with the cards the dealer gave me ... to the math with the numbers given in the question, and don't worry about whether they make sense.

I'm going to use this super-complex formula from higher mathematics, invented by the smartest person who ever lived, Professor Doctor Sir Isaac Newton, who also invented Calculus to help figure out something he was working on.
Anyway, here is his formula which I shall use to solve the 123-lb volleyball problem:

Force = Mass times Acceleration.

. F = M A .

We know the force and the mass, so we can write

0.27 Newton = 50.8 kg times acceleration.

With some Algebra, we find that

Acceleration = 0.27 Newton / 50.8 kg

Acceleration = 0.0053 m/s^2 .

Add that to the acceleration of gravity, and we find that the total acceleration of the ball is

. 9.8053 m/s^2

BUT only as long as the player's hand is in contact with it, pushing for all he's worth. After the ball loses contact with the player's hand, its acceleration settles back to just the acceleration of gravity ... 9.8 m/s^2 ... for the rest of the way down to the ground.

We can only hope that the exhausted player had enough energy left to step quickly aside, before the accelerating 123-lb concrete volleyball landed on his foot.

Amethod of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.