Driveline Baseball -

The final out was so painful.

Bluffton (Ind.) had come within one inning of the first state championship in program history. The Tigers had never played for a state title before. They had never played in a venue like Victory Field, the Triple-A home of the Indianapolis Indians, with the Indianapolis skyline looming beyond the outfield.

For a Class 2A school in a town of just 10,308, it was an unfamiliar stage. Nearly the entire community made the trip.

They carried a one-run lead into the final inning before powerhouse Mater Dei scratched across an infield single to score the tying run. The game went to extra innings, where Mater Dei eventually ended Bluffton's historic run.

For coach Adam King, the challenge was immediate. He had to process the gut punch, then turn around and face television cameras and reporters — an unusual scene for a small-school baseball program.

"What more can you say other than 'I'm proud of you boys, I love you boys,'" King said. "We gotta flush that one and our boys are already thinking about summer ball and getting better."

In that moment, perspective was difficult.

But the bigger picture was remarkable. The Tigers proved they belonged.

Out of 97 Class 2A programs in Indiana, Bluffton finished second. They did it without a single professional or Division I prospect. They did it largely with players who had been in the program before King arrived.

The state championship game was a chapter.

The transformation was the story.

Bluffton did not advance to Victory Field by discovering a golden generation of talent. The Tigers arrived because a small-town program changed its entire approach to player development.

"We dove all in," King said.

The Problem

When King took over the program a year earlier, he inherited a team that was not necessarily bad — but one that was not positioned to compete deep into the state tournament.

The old way was not going to be enough. And the personnel was not a fit for how they had been playing.

"We don't have a lot of team speed," King said. "Most of the guys that we have, if we want to get on second, we got to hit into the gap."

Bluffton had a number of physically strong players. But King believed they were not maximizing their abilities.

The answer was not more small ball. The answer was more slug.

King had always been curious about hitting development. Long before modern player development concepts reached high school baseball, he had read Ted Williams' The Science of Hitting. He understood that pulling the ball in the air could produce better outcomes, at a time when many coaches were still asking hitters to drive line drives back at the L-screen in BP.

Then he was introduced to a new world.

A few years ago, a family friend with a PhD in exercise physiology asked if he had heard of Driveline.

"I said, no, I don't think so," King recalled.

Soon after, King began studying Driveline hitting videos, reading research and learning the principles behind the training methods.

The more he learned, the more convinced he became. The second-year head coach moved from this could be part of Bluffton's process to this should be the foundation.

"Last summer became the overhauling of everything that we had done hitting-wise," King said. "We dove all in."

Buy-In

The first challenge was not equipment. It was belief.

King knew he had to explain to his players why they were changing.

He created a team text thread that became something of an educational platform. He shared videos — often Driveline videos — assigned homework, and connected what they were learning to the best hitters in the world in a tangible way.

"I'm watching the World Baseball Classic and there would be times I'd see a guy do something at the plate, and I'd be on my phone, rewind it on YouTube TV, take a video of it and send it to them," King said. "I'd write, 'Look at that guy staying in his hinge.'"

The players started to see the connection.

"When they read that Shohei Ohtani trained at Driveline they were like, 'That's crazy,'" King said.

Bluffton's 2A all-state catcher, Axton Beste, explained how the team bought in.

"Our players already have a really good relationship with all of the coaching staff," said Beste, a Huntington University commit as a rising senior. "Coach King, he came in my eighth-grade year and taught my English class. I clicked with him almost immediately."

The bond was already there for many players.

The next challenge was funding.

A small-school baseball budget was not designed for a complete player-development overhaul. So the program raised the money for the tools King felt they needed.

"Fundraising. A lot of fundraising from our guys," King said. "It's a lot of boots on the ground type of stuff."

They purchased tools Bluffton had never used before:

• Bat speed trainers
• Plyo Balls
• Smash Bats
• Long Bats
• Blast Motion

The equipment mattered. But what mattered more was what the equipment created: a feedback loop.

King's thinking at the time: "If we can lean into thinking pull side in the air, if we can lean into the rotation stuff, and into the bat speed, and make good swing decisions — I think we can make some big changes."

The Loop

What the players learned first-hand was that every drill with these tools produced information.

Every swing created feedback.

Every player could understand why something worked — or why it did not.

What they heard less and less of were verbal coaching cues. They were beginning to experience implicit learning. Their bodies were learning to self-organize.

"The thing I love most about so much of the Driveline equipment is that the feedback is instantaneous," King said.

Traditional coaching often relies on verbal instruction. The problem is that the same word or phrase can mean different things to different players.

The tools gave players something tangible.

King especially loved hitting Plyo Balls. Players immediately knew when they missed.

"Did it spin off the bottom? Did you spin off the top?" King said. "Let's talk about how we use the feedback."

The frustration was part of the process.

Even Bluffton's best players struggled.

"It's pissing some guys off," King said.

That includes Beste.

"Oh, yeah. The light ones for sure," Beste said of the Plyo Balls. "They frustrate me because you really see if you don't barrel it up."

But that was the point. The tools forced players to confront weaknesses and adjust.

"I'm not the one doing all the work," King said. "I can talk to them about it, but the tool is going to do a lot of the work."

The program's motto became: "Keep sharpening the knife."

Stack quality reps. Learn from each one. Let the data guide adjustments. Improve.

The players stopped seeing development as something controlled only by the coach. They began taking ownership.

"They start asking, 'Coach, what's my rotation score? What's my plane score? What's my bat speed?'" King said. "They bought into taking ownership of it."

The results followed.

Some players gained more than five miles per hour of bat speed within 10 weeks.

"I think those short bats, the soft toss, the front toss, and the machine with the short bats — I think those helped me a lot," Beste said. "The short bat helped more than the long bat just because … when you're hitting in game, and when you're even practicing, everything is up the middle, to the right side, and with the short bat it forces you to see it deep and kind of apply (proper mechanics)."

The improvements showed first in practice — in exit velocities, K-Vest readings and feedback from training tools. Then they showed up in games.

Early in conference play, Bluffton scored five runs in the first inning against Southern Wells. They added three in the second and six in the third.

"That was the moment I realized, 'This is the fruits of it,'" King said.

The most obvious change was power.

A year after hitting one home run, Bluffton hit 26. They even produced a seven-homer game.

Their extra-base hits doubled, from 41 to 83. Their slugging percentage jumped nearly 100 points.

Their ground-ball rate dropped from 45 percent to 40 percent, while their fly-ball rate increased from 28 percent to 33 percent.

King didn't want every player to become fly-ball heavy — not everyone possessed home run power — but he did want launch angles to climb into line-drive range, roughly five to 10 degrees.

And they accomplished all of it without sacrificing contact. Their strikeout rate remained essentially unchanged, dropping slightly from 19.8 percent to 19.6 percent.

King entered all the data into GameChanger. He watched the loud and the subtle changes happen in real time as the Tigers marched to a 19-11 regular season and through the postseason tournament.

A Bigger Lesson

Bluffton's transformation is about more than one high school team.

Modern player development has become common throughout professional baseball and many elite college programs, but it remains unusual at the high school level — especially at a small Class 2A school.

Bluffton is an outlier today. That means there is still tremendous opportunity for thousands of high school programs across the country.

The tools the Tigers added from Driveline and elsewhere were key to creating a data-based loop. But they proved something more important.

When players understand why they are training, receive immediate feedback and take ownership of their development, improvement does not have to be accidental.

"All these teams that we play against, it's like old-school coaches," King said, "and I'm like, 'You're sitting at home every year when it gets to the middle of June.' You can sit there and say, 'Well, the kids just don't execute the way we want it.'

"Maybe it's you that's got to change and not the kids."

The ending was bitter for Bluffton this past spring. The future will not be without challenges, either — the Tigers lose their two best pitchers among the graduating seniors.

But the foundation has changed.

The program is buying more hitting plyos. King plans to expand into data-based pitching development. He plans to accumulate and invest in more data.

The biggest change? Bluffton no longer believes development is something that simply happens.

Development is something that can be measured and driven. It is something that can be built.

And for a program that has existed for more than 115 years — one that counts former Major Leaguer Everett Scott among its alumni — that may be the most significant accomplishment of all.

"(The seniors) have taken this program, not to say we were in the doldrums, but we've never done anything like this — ever — however long the baseball program has been around," King said. "We've been around as long as Everett Scott and he's a 1909 graduate."

The seniors who built this transformation are leaving behind more than a state runner-up banner.

They are leaving behind a roadmap to improvement. They are leaving behind a new standard.