Ways to Gain a Softball Recruiting Advantage With Tech – Free E-Book!

She was 13 carrying a big bat. Not even out of middle school, she showed up at the Louisiana Tech softball prospect camp this summer launching batting practice pitches over the fence—more than all the 16, 17, and 18-year-olds she stood there with—and it had the Louisiana Tech staff rushing back to their iPads.

Just to see her Blast numbers.

When it comes to recruiting, an eye test just isn’t enough anymore. The coaches wanted to know her bat speed and peak hand speed because, the honest truth was, they couldn’t believe their eyes.

“As far as recruiting goes, you kind of just want your eyes to match what the data says, so you’re just fact-checking your eyes to a certain degree,” says Tyler Krobetzky, a Louisiana Tech assistant coach. “This 13-year-old, I knew about her coming in. We knew she hit the crap out of the ball. But the ball was just jumping off her bat and going way over the fence, more so than older girls. So you’re like, ‘Is it a hot bat? What is it?’ We just want to validate what we’re seeing. And sure enough, her Blast numbers matched exactly that. She swung just as fast as the 18-year-olds—22 Peak hand speed, 70 to 72 mile per hour bat speed. These were definitive numbers.”