Slammers Athlete Development 2023 Year in Review
AVP, Slammer Score, Athletic Foundations, Summer Lifting, Speed Training, Slammers Dashboard.
As the 2023 calendar year comes to a close, let’s take a quick look at the year in review for Slammers baseball through a developmental lens. It’s important for us as an organization to continue to learn and grow so that we can continue to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to development - and this year, we did just that.
This is a long blog. If you’ve been following along, a lot of this is review. If you haven’t, this is your opportunity to catch up. We did a lot this year.
This year we put a focus on creating a way to deliver all of the data we’ve been capturing on our athletes for the past few years. Collecting and aggregating data from multiple sources on over 1,000 athletes is a task – we feel like we’re getting better in this regard. As much of a task as aggregating the data is, communicating it isn’t easy – and that is why we’ve made a considerable investment to develop our own dashboard to deliver all of your data to one place. Now athletes can track trends in their Rapsodo data, Loden Sports athlete data, and very soon, all of their Gamechanger stats. We’re providing every athlete with a compass for their development. We’re excited about the dashboard and the future improvements that are in the works.
Internally, we are using the data we’re collecting to provide college coaches with objective information that they can trust. Through a developmental lens, we’ve begun to study some of the macro trends across our teams to develop programming to objectively improve attributes that we know matter in our athletes. More on this later…
Exposure
2023 High School Slammer Score Days
In late May and early June, each of our high school athletes participated in our first annual Slammer Score Days. This allowed us to uniformly capture metrics that we can trust internally for development purposes, but also that the college community can trust. A general overview:
All players were measured for height and weight.
Pitchers threw standardized bullpens on a Rapsodo.
Hitters completed standardized batting practice off of a machine on a Rapsodo.
All players completed a Loden Sports evaluation that measured Power, Quickness, Speed, and their overall Loden Score.
Video was taken of each pitcher and hitter during their respective bullpen and batting practice sessions.
Each player that participated received a Slammer Score.
Each player that participated was featured in a tweet from the @SlammersAD account on Twitter.
We look forward to creating more opportunities for our athletes to capture trusted metrics in 2024.
2024 College Commitments
With the 2023 calendar year coming to a close, we wanted to take a moment to shout out the 16 (and counting) college commitments in our 2024 class across all teams. Congrats to all of the guys who have committed and we’re excited to follow your futures.
2023 MLB Draft
This year also saw 7 Slammers Alumni find their way into affiliated professional baseball – 6 via the 2023 MLB Draft and 1 as an undrafted free agent. Congrats to our guys and their families and we look forward to watching you all continue your journeys to the show in 2024.
Athlete Development
In the past year, Slammers has begun to focus on the importance of building a strong athletic foundation. Loden Sports has provided us with a quick and easy evaluation that we can trust to benchmark key developmental markers such as power, quickness, and speed. We use the Loden Sports Performance Lab App across all of our athletic development curriculum as a way to track and measure progress.
The bottom line is that the more athletic you are, the harder you’re going to throw, the harder you’re going to hit the ball, and the faster you’re going to run.
Advanced Velocity Program
During the 2022-2023 AVP, over 80 athletes at Slammers South saw an average velocity gain of +4.2 mph during the 5-month program. Learn more about where velocity comes from and how Slammers helps athletes improve their velocity with a holistic program unlike any other in the state of Colorado. Also, imagine what would happen if they participated in the program year-round...
Athletic Foundations
Let’s face it, there’s no undo button that will take us back to when we were kids and we ran around in the neighborhood everyday until the sun went down. The disappearance of free play in a child’s physical development is a silent pandemic. For the majority, it’s either structured practice and competition or video games.
Slammers created the Athletic Foundations curriculum for youth athletes to focus on fostering basic movement skills for their health (injury prevention) and for performance. The best opportunity that our kids will have to get faster and jump higher is while their bodies are still growing. We strategically disguised their vegetables (an athletic development curriculum) as candy (free play and games)…
As a group, the 30 kids who participated got faster and were jumping higher at the end of two months. Check out a full run down of the curriculum and the improvements we saw here.
Summer Lifting: Holzemer 2025
Jump RSI (Reactive Strength Index) is a measure of muscular fatigue. It is one of a few metrics that Slammers dials into from the Loden Sports jump tests. Loden Sports has observed across multiple high school sports that RSI declines over the course of a competitive season. This is why lifting in season is a competitive advantage – if your RSI doesn’t decline and your competition’s does, you are more likely to stay healthy and remain at peak performance.
So, Slammers Holzemer 2025 lifted through the summer with Strength Coach Bailey Collins. Using the Loden Sports testing from the end of May and the end of August, we were able to observe the change in jump RSI during the 3-month, travel-heavy, competitive season.
While Slammers Holzemer 2025 lifted through the summer, two of Slammers 2024 teams did not. As you can see, while Holzemer 2025’s team average jump RSI remained the same, the two 2024 team’s average jump RSI fell significantly.
What did we learn? All of our high school athletes should be lifting through the summer if for no other reason than for their health.
A note to young athletes: strength and conditioning is your health. It is the foundation for your athleticism. If you let the foundation crumble, you are subjecting yourself to a higher risk of injury. High school baseball athletes should be lifting – in some capacity – 12 months out of the year. Go see Bailey Collins.
Fall Speed Training: Bitzer 2027
Slammers Bitzer 2027 got faster over the course of 6 weeks during fall workouts and honestly, it’s low-hanging fruit for most of the athletes at Slammers. All it took was 2, 15-minute sessions per week, seriously, you can read all about it here.
If you practice the piano regularly, you’ll become a better piano player. If you sprint regularly, you’ll get faster.
The holiday bonus of getting faster is that it bulletproofs your hamstrings (injury prevention), helps your defense (more range), helps your arm strength and helps you hit the ball harder (makes your legs more explosive). If speed isn’t the gift that keeps on giving.
So, then Coach Quintana wanted to do the same thing for his youth team and they’ve added the same program to their practices since the beginning of November… It’s good for your athletes and it isn’t hard. Available to any coach upon request.
Slammers Baseball Performance Score
If you remember, we broke down the four factors that contribute to velocity (and exit velocity) in baseball in our Slammers South AVP Recap 2022 Offseason blog. If you don’t remember, here’s the link again, so click it and catch yourself up:
Length (height)
Mechanics
Rotational power
Vertical power
Something we are currently cooking up in the lab is a baseball-specific performance score. We recently combined elements of the Loden Sports testing with a rotational med ball throw and created a performance index for all of our AVP athletes and a handful of our pro guys did it too. It is highly correlated to throwing velocity. Higher score = throw harder (and/or hit harder).
Let’s take a peak under the hood, shall we?
How to read this:
Athlete 1 is Max Kuhns. He threw the med ball 59.8 ft. on his dominant side which puts him in 100th percentile for rotational power. He registered 74.6 Loden Power Points on his rebound jumps which put him in the 98th percentile for vertical power. He is our hardest thrower and his performance score is 99.0. His rotational ingredient is balanced with his vertical ingredient.
Athlete 12 is Peyton Remy. He threw the med ball 40 ft. on his dominant side which puts him in the 74th percentile for rotational power. He registered 80.7 Loden Power Points on his rebound jumps which put him in the 100th percentile for vertical power. His performance score is 86.8, however he favors vertical power output over rotational power output. Knowing this, Peyton should put an additional emphasis on rotational power in his training.
WE KNOW THE INGREDIENTS AND WE KNOW HOW TO IMPROVE THEM.
This is something to look out for in 2024.
The Slammer Score + Launch of the Dashboard
Slammers Dashboard
As you are all aware by now, the Slammers Dashboard has launched and we are excited about it. If you need a refresher, learn more here. Also, if you haven’t accessed your profile yet, please reach out to mpajak@slammersbaseball.com and we’ll get you going.
We are actively working on enhancements based on the first round of feedback you gave us and, of course, we have much more planned for the platform in 2024. Remember, all of your data will appear in your profile whenever we collect it.
The Slammer Score
As you are all aware by now, we launched the first rendition of the Slammer Score in 2023. If you need a refresher, you can read all about how we take inputs from the Loden Sports athletic testing and Rapsodo data from bullpens and batting practice sessions to create a true, objective marker of athlete development in baseball here.
The beauty of the Slammer Score and all of the data inputs is that we’re able to track the development of our athletes year-over-year creating an objective history of each player’s journey. Instead of pointing to a singular moment in time and saying, this is what this player is, we will be able to see trends.
The Slammer Score puts an emphasis on objective pieces of the puzzle that we know matter at higher levels of baseball. But what about right now? We put together a fun graphic below that shows the average Slammer Score on each of our high school teams from data collected during our Slammer Score Days before the summer started.
As you can see, there is trend between higher average Slammer Scores and winning percentage from this past summer. Skip the next two sentences if you don’t deal in statistics: when we ran the regression analysis, there was a significant correlation between Slammer Score and winning percentage. There was also a significant correlation between the Loden Score and winning percentage.
The bottom line: if we can create more opportunities for individual players to improve their Slammer Scores (AVP, Athletic Foundations, lifting year-round, enhancing development curriculum) and players commit to their own improvement, we will raise the competitive level for all of our teams.
Slammer Score 2.0 [Working Title]
The Slammer Score currently doesn’t factor in game performance. With Slammer Score 2.0, that is going to change. If the current Slammer Score is a representation of a player’s potential, the Slammer Score 2.0 will be a representation of a players potential applied – because, in competitive baseball, what you do on the field matters.
We’re excited to roll this out in 2024 once it’s a bit more polished. Stay tuned!