Seth Von Behren is the director of player development at Gators Baseball Academy’s (GBA) high school and college program and also helps with the recruiting and transition recruiting from high school to college.
He spent four years at Illinois State University playing baseball. From there, he immediately transitioned into coaching, spending two years at Westchester University in Philadelphia and then to Charleston, South Carolina with the College of Charleston under coach John Pawlowski. From there, Von Behrne went to South Alabama, followed by St. Louis as the head coach at a division two school before transitioning to the GBA program.
His vision is to help players mature as people and use technology the right way to develop their skills. He wants GBA to be recognized as one of the leading developmental programs in the country in terms of the way they use technology to teach their kids. To do so, he turned to Blast.
One of his main goals is getting players to work On Plane and getting Rotational numbers to match up, and Blast helps them do so. “I would tell you that the hitters, when they can sit down and see the 3D part of their swing, when they can start seeing their swing off plane, now it’s a whole lot easier to correct,” he says. This is versus the coaches saying, “Hey, your swing looks like a check mark. It’s not always really easy to fix until you see it for yourself.”
Von Behren likes the fact that technology doesn’t lie. “We get in front of a computer and we start looking at numbers and we start looking at video. Those kids now are making those changes much quicker.”
They still have the initial conversation asking, “Can this kid play? Can this kid not play?” But now they add, “How do his numbers stack up against player B in California?” They have hard numbers that can answer those type of questions.
“I would say that Blast allows us to compare kids from our across the country instead of just inside of our organization,” Von Behren says. “It’s a baseline test. And that’s as simple as I can probably put it. It’s a baseline against every kid in the country and says, ‘Hey, these numbers stack up and this is what we see when those numbers look like this, based on what Blast is giving us.’”
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