OMAHA (KMTV) — Being a pitcher takes a toll on baseball and softball athletes.
Researchers at UNO hope to keep them on the field longer by analyzing their mechanics.
- The Pitching Lab at UNO recently relocated to the Health Science Collaborative on the east side of campus.
- Students and staff work with baseball and softball pitchers to improve mechanics and reduce the risk of injury.
- While UNO baseball and softball student-athletes can use the facility for free, it is $400 per pitcher per assessment for the public.
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Covering 60 feet before you can blink.
"This is one of the most explosive movements in all of sports,” Dustin Schorie, an incoming athletic training master’s student and former Bellevue University pitcher, said.
Being a pitcher can take a toll on the body.
"You are putting so much stress on your elbow and shoulder, really the rest of your body, to generate a pitch and a ball at 90 miles an hour that just flies through the air with pinpoint accuracy,” Adam Rosen, co-director of UNO’s Sports Biomechanics Lab, said.
That's where the UNO Pitching Lab comes in.
Recently relocated; students and staff in sports medicine and biomechanics work to keep athletes on the field longer.
"If we can avoid that injury at 11 years old and we can straighten something out at 23 years old, that's kind of the key,” Brandon Doehne, a sports biomechanics PhD student and former college pitcher, said.
With the help of 16 specialized cameras and dozens of sensors.
Ds: "Part of being a good performer is being able to do the same moves in the same order time and time again,” Schorie said.
Once pitchers throw they can access all sorts of data about their mechanics.
"We can break down the movement to a millimeter,” Rosen said. “And really break down exactly what their ankle, foot, knee, hip, shoulder is doing to get to that release point and what that ball is doing on the back end."
"I always think of it as like a tool in your tool belt,” Schorie said.
While baseball and softball athletes can use the facilities for free, it's $400 per athlete per assessment for the public.
Comparatively:
"It's $450 for your top end bat,” Doehne said. “A glove, they'll be anywhere from 300 for a stock mitt off the shelf, to 550 for a custom."
“You don't take a car out unless it's got gas in it and all the parts are working in proper order,” Rosen said. “So why don't we treat our bodies that way too and really be able to assess if our bodies are capable of handling those high intensity loads."
More than 400 athletes have used the lab since it opened in 2019, and the goals remain the same: safety and performance.
