Recently technology has been introduced into the world of sports to help better players and teams all together whether it is high school sports or pro sports. By using technology in sports, it can show you what you are doing correctly or doing wrong. Athletes can go back and look at the data to try to figure out what they did right to fix something like a bad habit.

The baseball team uses technology to help its players learn, according to head coach Damien Tippett. The Pumas use technology year-round and in a variety of situations, “Even when we do well, we still want to know what we’re doing well in,” he said.

Perry’s baseball team uses software and video to help develop its players. Since the very beginning of baseball, they have always used paper to write down stats and spray charts of what’s going on in the game but in 2011, the Pumas went digital with GameChanger – an app that replaces the traditional scorebook.

“GameChanger helped us save time entering stats from the old scorebook, as well as break down new metrics that were eye-opening for us at the time,” Tippett said.

One metric that helped his pitchers was the first strikes that lead to outs, as well as the break down for which pitchers garner more ground balls versus fly balls.

“That type of information really helps us manage our pitchers throughout a game,” he said.

Another app the team uses is Axon – a virtual reality pitch-recognition program. Tippett first learned of the program from the football program, where coach Preston Jones uses Axon with his quarterbacks.

“I think it helps a little, just gives good data but for the price, it’s worth it,” junior JD Willis said.

Diamond Kinetics is where the player put this product on the knob of the bat, and it takes a 3D image of the swing path and can even tell you how much forcing you’re giving, and it can show a video of everything too. This company also invented a baseball with a microchip inside of it for pitchers to use to tell spin rate and where the release point is and many other things along with it.

The team raises the money for its technology on its own; there is no budget for training tools from the school.  Without the booster club, teams could not afford these products for 21st-century training. Although they are not as expensive as other gadgets like HitTrax or Rapsodo, it is up to each individual team to provide training tools – whether they are sports equipment or technological tools – by themselves.