Looking to improve your swing or track batting progress? There’s an app for that. Whether you play for the Mallards or your company’s summer league, a new system called the LeadOff is designed to help athletes of all levels excel.
The LeadOff, designed by sports technology company Sensori Athletics, is a system that allows baseball and softball players to measure their hitting swing, receive feedback on specific, quantifiable opportunities for improvement, and track the progress of their training over time.
The Sensori team, co-founded by Kyle Kiepert, Peter Oppermann, Greg Roble and Shengqi Zhu, is in the midst of promoting its latest technology.
“We’re focusing on reaching coaches first, which has allowed us to rapidly iterate and improve our initial product offering, as we are engaging the most knowledgeable segment of customers,” Oppermann said. “We have a group of beta customers, which we’ve dubbed ‘Team Sensori’, currently using the product in their practice and instruction … as well as numerous other coaches and private lesson instructors throughout the state.”
A small sensor is attached to the athlete’s bat and communicates wirelessly with the Leadoff application on a smartphone or tablet. The application then generates quantitative metrics like bat speed and visual graphs of the athlete’s swing. The user is able to review this information in real time during practice to get immediate feedback, and he/she also has access to an online portal to look at the data in more detail and compare metrics to past performance.
Although the LeadOff is expected to launch for general consumers at the end of summer, Oppermann said Sensori has already seen success with pre-orders from some of the premier coaches and instructors throughout the Midwest.
The motion-capturing technology is offered at the pre-order price of $99 and post-launch price of $139. The app itself is free.
Keeping its focus on the LeadOff, Oppermann said the company has not yet explored additional applications or product extensions, but the hardware is designed so that it is versatile and can translate into new products in the future.
