The off-season is wrapping up and high school tryouts are underway - despite the bad weather in Seattle! Our athletes are reporting to tryouts stronger, more powerful, and in the best shape of their lives. As I talked about in Some Results From the Velocity Development Program, our guys have seen some great jumps in fastball velocity. Here's a summary of how our athletes have done in that regard:

• Alex M, 13 years old: +2 MPH
• Travis T, 13 years old: +5 MPH
• Ted W, 16 years old: +8 MPH
• Eli M, 17 years old: +6 MPH

Eli jumped from 75 MPH to 81 MPH - while on a badly sprained right ankle! We look forward to the numbers he's going to put up when he is fully healthy. Our goals for him are to be consistently at 83-84 MPH on the mound heading into his freshman year of college baseball at a bodyweight of 185-190 pounds. (He is 5'11".)

Here's what Travis's mother had to say about her son's gains during the training period:

I went to Travis’s team practice this weekend at the cages, wow I could really see a difference in Travis’s hitting and pitching!  He looked awesome and the speed on his fastball was visibly improved.  I look forward to seeing him run and see the improvement in his speed as well.

Everyone's taking a week or so off to deload and then will be back at it, training hard during the season. How we manage athletes in-season is different than the off-season, but they still train hard and we expect them to make strength, power, and sport-specific gains throughout the spring and summer seasons.