Prep Baseball Report

Announcement: Advanced Athletic Testing Coming to All PBR Events This Summer


PBR Staff

 

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This summer, Prep Baseball Report events across the country will be equipped with Swift Performance’s industry-leading athletic testing technologies to capture pinpoint accurate, actionable data for all participants, ultimately delivering new insights into athletes’ speed, explosiveness and power for recruiters to evaluate.

Just as we delivered players and scouts alike unprecedented access and instant feedback to TrackMan’s ball-tracking data, and Blast’s swing-analysis outputs, we are now arming events coast-to-coast with unparalleled athletic testing benchmarking technology. 

“In any competitive sport, athleticism is the most critical indicator of potential success,”

said Prep Baseball Report President Sean Duncan. “Yet in baseball, the standard base measurement for athletes is to run a 60-yard dash. The 60 is antiquated, and makes little sense, primarily because baseball players never have to run 60 yards. But we continue to do it because of the historical benchmarking, which still is important, but it reveals very little about a player’s overall athleticism.

“Baseball is behind the times in athletic testing at the amateur level. So when we decided to make a large investment to help affect change, our main priority was, and always will be, to deliver the players insightful data to help them advance to the next level. While doing our market research, it became abundantly clear to us that Swift Performance is the gold standard in athletic testing, and its technology is second-to-none. Beyond that, Swift’s end-to-end capabilities enables us to ingest all the data so it can hit players’ profiles immediately to receive instant feedback from their performance.”

Athleticism Revealed

Now, participants at all Prep Baseball Report events will be put through a jump protocol on Swift’s industry-leading EZEJump system, which will deliver key insights around an athlete’s explosiveness and quick-twitch athleticism. Chief among the critical outputs is athletes will receive their Reactive Strength Index (RSI), which is a key insight into their explosive strength. RSI is derived from the jump height divided by ground contact time. 

In regards to running, yes, athletes will still perform the 60-yard dash, as that historical context is still valuable for athletes and evaluators. More importantly, however, we are implementing three more timing gates at the 10 and 30 yards, to capture athletes’ quickness, explosiveness and reaction time. From there, we will calculate an athlete’s top-end speed in miles per hour.

Swift’s timing gates are the most accurate in its space. Swift’s in-beam start makes it impossible to cheat, so sorry athletes, there likely will be no sub-six 60s run at PBR events. 

Eleven MLB organizations and countless universities rely on Swift Performance with their athletic testing, chiefly because Swift equipment is the most accurate and versatile timing equipment on the market.

All athletic testing outputs will be delivered to player profiles, and the datasets can be contextualized in Performance Tiers, so athletes will know where they stack up in their state and class. 

“Sean Duncan was looking to 'future proof' his technology investment, and our products met that expectation with ease,” said Mark Fisher, Director at Swift Performance. “Businesses like PBR are looking for an end-to-end solution, and our products, apps and cloud service along with our willingness to work with PBR to integrate with their own systems made his choice easy. At the end of the day we are the new Gold Standard in this technology space" 

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