Baseball Coaches Explore New Drills and Tech at St. Cloud Clinic

ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- Area baseball coaches were in St. Cloud on Saturday getting ready for the upcoming season. About 55 coaches were attending the Starz of Tomorrow Baseball Academy's Coaches' Clinic. The clinic focused on hands-on sessions over lectures and taught the coaches a variety of techniques.

New technology is changing the game.

Starz of Tomorrow Director Pat Dolan says the camp also lets the coaches get hands-on with new equipment:

"We have this Trackman machine that shows all the analytic stuff with exit velocity, vertical plane, horizontal plane, spin rates. It's a nice piece of equipment to really give you some actual feedback, whereas ten years ago it was kind of just a radar gun, and thirty years ago it was just kind of by your eye, kind of looking at it."

He says it's a new world with technology in baseball, and it pays dividends pretty quickly.

Dolan says they try to go over a lot of the changes in how things are done in baseball now versus the past:

"We're talking about strength and conditioning. Thirty years ago baseball players weren't supposed to lift at all and now those Major Leaguers that are throwing a hundred plus miles an hour, they're lifting right when they're done with their game, they're in the locker room, they're not even going to watch the rest of the game, they go in the weight room right away, so we're talking about strength and conditioning and then a lot of the new drills."

He says youth coaches only have a few weeks to prepare for the season, so getting up to speed on new methods early can be important.

The Coaches Clinic ran from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and cost $150 per coaching staff of four or $75 for individuals. There was also a clinic for area youth players, and those camps run weekly into April.

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