Thread: Comparing two objects

I have two objects, player1 and player 2. These two objects have properties: String first name,String last name, double weight and int grade. I want to create a method that takes in a player object and compares it with the players in my list. So, for example, something like this:

  protected void find(T target)
  // Searches list for an occurence of an element e such that
  // e.equals(target). If successful, sets instance variables
  // found to true and location to the array index of e. If
  // not successful, sets found to false.
  {
    location = 0;
    found = false;
 
    while (location < numElements) 
    {
      if ([B]list[location].equals(target)[/B])
      {  
        found = true;
        return;
      }
      else
        location++;
    }
  }

But when I pass in a player with the EXACT same attributes as a player in the list, the equals method still returns false. What do I have to do to compare two players so that

player1 = (George, Lemons, 180, 9)
player2 = (George, Lemons, 180, 9)
player1.equals(player2)

returns true?

What if I have an equals method in my player class but I want to compare two player objects outside that class? How could I, for example, check to see that an element of an array of type player is equal to some player. i.e.

protected void find(T target)
  // Searches list for an occurence of an element e such that
  // e.equals(target). If successful, sets instance variables
  // found to true and location to the array index of e. If
  // not successful, sets found to false.
  {
    location = 0;
    found = false;
 
    while (location < numElements) 
    {
      if [B](list[location].equals(target)[/B])
      {  
        found = true;
        return;
      }
      else
        location++;
    }
  }

How do I use my .equals method here in this separate class to check if they're equal?