MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — As snow blankets the ground in Morgantown and sub-freezing temperatures settle in, the WVU baseball team is two weeks away from opening up the season at Georgia Southern. Like many northern schools, outdoor practice time prior to a season opener is usually at a premium. However, the Mountaineers have an important asset in their preseason preparation with the WVU Baseball Biomechanics and Performance Center. Situated across from their team facility and just beyond the right field fence at Kendrick Family Ballpark, the facility that opened in March of 2025 provides an indoor environment to get ready for the season. It also gives the team access to a network of cameras and analytical tools, providing the coaching staff with numerous data points to chart performance.
“Using KinaTrax and quantifying every rate of rotation, every speed at which their joint angles move is critical in making changes comparative to the best throwers in the world,” said WVU Director of Pitching and Pitching Personnel Chris Reilly. “And obviously, the Trackman allows us to create attractive shapes of pitches.”
In a sport that is increasingly reliant on analytics at all levels, multiple cameras, Trackman technology and force plates that measure where pitchers land and their body positioning, combine to paint a picture of each athlete’s unique delivery. Former WVU pitchers Tyler Switalski and Griffin Kirn stopped by the facility earlier this week as they are gearing up for their professional seasons in the Giants and the A’s organizations, respectively. National League Cy Young Award winner Paul Skeens also visited the facility in 2025.
“Our players are recruited here knowing that they are going to get the best resources and best coaching that we can provide them. A lot of our players were really excited for this facility. Now, making sure they can take the data, process it in their drill work and make changes throughout the year and then go out and compete with their newly-found adjustments, that has been the key to our development process.”
Dr. Courtney Semkewyc is the lead biomechanist for the WVU baseball team. She explains exactly what information can come from the force plates and the bank of cameras.
“Around the mound, we have eight cameras, which is a KinaTrax motion capture machine,” Semkewyc said. “We also have two grip cameras to see how the ball is being released from the pitchers hand.
“On the summary report, you can pretty much get a players’ entire skeleton, their key points in the delivery. These are ten key metrics that I find important. It is color-coded to MLB averages. If they are green, they are within MLB average. If they are yellow, they are slightly outside of that.
“From this, we can actually see how the pitcher is using the ground and kind of get a ceiling of their power. We can see if they are actually putting force into the ground. Then when they stop, how well are they redirecting that energy back up the chain into the kinematic sequence.”
Graduate student Reese Bassinger led the Mountaineers with 30 appearances on the mound last spring. Semkewyc describes an adjustment the staff would like to see in Bassinger’s delivery.
“When he lands, he tends to have a very vertical ground reaction force,” Semkewyc said. “He is really over this lead leg. What we want and what we have been working on with him is actually getting this direction more backwards, back towards second base. He has been doing different med ball drills to actually work on that. This day was slightly better. We can see numbers here looking to his vertical and his backwards force, it has increased for him, which is really good.”
Even as the weather warms up and full scale practices and bullpen sessions move outside, the indoor center can still be used to chart progress throughout the season and the offseason as well.
“We like to retest our pitchers continuously, especially we are going to do it during the season,” Semkewyc said. “This will be the first season that it is actually open and we can fully use it. It will be good to know when they are going really well what they are doing well. And then if they are in a slump, how we can get them back to what they were doing. It is setting up specific checkpoints to be able to see if there are any flags, or if they are on track.”
“We use the technology from the time they get to campus all the way to the time when they are done,” Reilly said. “What that allows us to do is collect data at different points in the year. As their bodies change, as they get stronger, as they make delivery adjustments and delivery cues, what we want to do is be able to capture them at their best and then reference back to where they are performing at their best.”
There are some challenges with translating numbers on a computer screen into tangible improvements on the field when a pitcher is lined up 60 feet and 6 inches from a batter. Preventing information overload is a top priority.
“We get an insane amount of data,” Semkewyc said. “Our reports alone are 13 pages long. We don’t want the players to really get in their head about all the numbers. Typically, it will go through the coaches. I will sit down with the coaches and go over the report. We’ll decide these are their strengths and weaknesses. These are the drills that are going to help them improve. Then they deliver that to the players. We will show [pitchers] specific pieces of the report. But we don’t give them access to the full thing.”
“What we do with that data is ultimately what makes our facility different,” Reilly said. “[Semkewyc] works with us and our players on a daily basis. She is heavily involved in basically coaching the coaches with reports and how our guys’ bodies and deliveries move and swings move in comparison to players at the highest level.”
Another challenge for the staff is to replicate the same deliveries indoors to outside in front of a packed ballpark in a high-leverage situation.
“It is harder for them to have super-high intent in here or as much adrenaline,” Semkewyc said. “Typically, they throw a little bit slower or some of them will have a slightly different slot. Most of it does translate though. There are just a few differences.”
If pitchers develop bad habits or try to overthrow at times, a look at the analytics can also help with injury prevention.
“Obviously, there is an injury epidemic right now in baseball with how hard everyone is throwing,” Semkewyc said. “A big piece of this lab is actually trying to mitigate that. With the motion capture, we can see stresses on their arms. We can see their shoulder force. We can see their elbow torque, which leads to UCL injuries. We can actually see that and say, ‘OK, they are flagged for having high torque’. And then we can go in for say that these are the mechanical adjustments they need to make to alleviate that torque and actually help them mitigate that injury.”
Similar technology from force plates on the pitchers mound can also be helpful for batters taking their cuts in the cage.
“In the batting cages, one of them has Swing Catalyst, which is also force plate technology which is recessed into the concrete,” Reilly said. “It allows our hitting coaches to make swing adjustments on how they are capturing their power out of the ground and really making fine tuned decisions on their swing paths. Position players also use it as a training facility. We can pull back the cages and make it a big space so they can warm up and make a dynamic throw. They can take ground balls and do glove work while also making it the first indoor batting cage West Virginia baseball has had.”