April 17, 2021

By J.P. Antonacci

Canadian Baseball Network

Ben Abram added life to his fastball and bulked up to ward off injury.

Elijha Hammill tweaked his technique and became a terror on the basepaths.

And Kevin Horton is excited for even more success stories now that the Ontario Terriers have expanded their partnership with The Performance Lab, a world-class sports science facility led by Dr. Carmine Filice.

“For us, it was about how do we not just incorporate data into the Terriers training, but how do we really make players better by using that data?” said Horton, general manager of The Baseball Zone.

“This will just take it to a whole different level for the kids.”

New this season, all 72 players across the 15U to 18U Terriers program will visit the North York lab for a full assessment using the lab’s cutting-edge tools, including 3D motion capture technology and ground force reaction plates.

They will leave with a customized, data-driven training program and a new team of experts in their corner.

“Data has now really come to the forefront. When you collect data, you create a platform from which you can build your athletes up,” said Rick Johnston, president and co-owner of the Baseball Zone and the Terriers and a coach with the organization.

Filice said his goal at The Performance Lab is to help players reach the next level by eliminating their weaknesses, correcting bad habits, and unlocking their potential.

That process starts with each player slipping into a motion capture suit dotted with sensors – the same technology used to mimic athletes’ motions in sports video games.

“The kids are inquisitive. This generation understands tech better than any generation before, so they’ve grown up with it,” Filice said.

“So you marry that with the sport they love, and it’s fun, because they start to understand it, and it’s easy for them to buy in and really trust the process. And then they have that light bulb moment when they make that gain – whether it’s their shoulder stops hurting or they get the few miles an hour on their fastball they’re looking for.”

Filice, who holds a doctorate of chiropractic, founded The Performance Lab after establishing himself as a renowned performance therapist and strength and conditioning coach.

While he enjoys the challenge of using sports science to help top-tier athletes achieve peak performance – from professional baseball, hockey and tennis players to Olympians and world champions – he also relishes the chance to guide young players along the right conditioning path.

“At the kid level, it’s much more fun, because it’s developmental,” Filice said. “It’s getting to see them improve so quickly and seeing the massive gains, and helping them realize their own goals.”

‘Bulletproofing’ against injury

One thing that sets The Performance Lab apart is its specificity.

Instead of dispensing general advice like “build up your lower body” or “work on your flexibility,” Filice and his team combine hi-tech analysis with decades of experience in sports science to identify specific muscles that need strengthening and exact mechanical adjustments players should make to use their abilities to the fullest.

That’s compelling for the Terriers coaching staff, Horton said.

“It’s so specific to their movement patterns that it’ll tell us how fast muscles are firing and when there’s incorrect sequencing in the swing – say he gets his hands going before his legs. Just things that are so detailed,” he said.

“It’s identifying where in the body the movement deficiencies are. Having one weakness can be the only thing holding you back from getting to the next level.”

While the analysis can get granular, Filice keeps it simple for the players themselves.

“We give them as much information as we think they need in order to succeed, but not too much that they’re overthinking it,” he said.

“Our goal is to do it in such a way that the change happens without even thinking about it. At the end of the day, we just want them to perform better.”

But before players can perform better, they have to learn how to stay on the field. That’s why Filice makes injury prevention his top priority.

“The first thing we do is try and bulletproof them,” he said.

The lab’s battery of high-tech tests can reveal motions that, if left uncorrected, could lead to injury down the road.

“Once we feel comfortable that the kids aren’t going to hurt themselves and they’re ready to make that transition, then we start going after the performance gains,” Filice said.

The lab crafts an individual training program for each player that includes exercises, weight training, and drills to develop specific muscles or work on attributes like flexibility.

Then the work can begin.

A key analytical tool is force plate technology, which Filice describes as “a very high-tech bathroom scale that measures forces in all directions.”

Most scales only measure vertical force, but force place technology can also measure horizontal force, also known as lateral force production.

“For baseball that’s extremely important,” said Filice, since lateral force is generated when pitchers push off the rubber or batters drive the ball forward.

Players are re-tested on a regular basis, both to make sure they aren’t heading toward an injury and to keep them accountable, since the data will reveal if they’ve been doing their homework on the conditioning side.

Strong foundation

The Terriers connection with The Performance Lab began when Mike and Nicole Tevlin’s kids started training with Filice.

When the couple became co-owners of the Terriers in 2015, the club incorporated the lab’s principles in their pitching and hitting programs.

Half a dozen players on either side of the ball tried out the program and were “blown away” by the technology and the results, Horton said, as pitchers bumped up their velocity and hitters improved their bat speed.

“Those kids, there’s complete buy-in as soon as they get into the program and start going with it. It’s just such an eye-opener, and when they start seeing the progression, seeing it on the screen – it’s going to be pretty cool to watch them develop,” Horton said.

Increased interest in analytics across the sport – including by U.S. college coaches and recruiters – prompted the Terriers to double down on sports science in 2021-22.

“It’s been a great partnership. I think our mindsets are the same,” Filice said.

“It just made sense to grow it even more and run it with all the kids, because the insight is so important for injury prevention and what exactly has to be done to get a player to whatever their goal is.”

For pitchers, their goal is often to throw harder. The modern game prioritizes power on the mound, and a mid-nineties fastball isn’t the meal ticket it was once.

There is no magic to The Performance Lab’s claim that pitchers stand to gain as much as seven miles per hour in velocity – or even more – after a single year of training, Filice said. Such improvement is possible after players strengthen key muscles and learn to use their bodies more efficiently.

“The question always gets asked, ‘How do you work with a sport like baseball, where two pitchers don’t look anything alike, and two batters don’t look anything alike?’” Filice said.

“And our answer is, you’re absolutely right, but the neurology, the physics behind it is almost identical.”

Elite pitchers may have different windups, but Filice said at key moments “they look exactly the same.”

“The hips peak at a specific time, and then right at the peak the torso comes in, and at the peak of the torso the arm comes in, et cetera,” he said.

“At the elite level, the timing of that transfer is identical. What we’re trying to do is give the kids the strength to do that, and then bring in that pattern so everything is working in sync.”

At the Terriers level, that usually means getting pitchers to strengthen their core and lower body so they are not straining their arm, and risking injury, with every pitch.

With stronger leg muscles, pitchers can plant and hold their front foot on delivery so they can funnel all their strength into the pitch and not have any energy bleed out through poor technique.

“We build it from the ground up, because they need that foundation,” Filice said.

Removing the guesswork

Partnering with The Performance Lab means an organizational change for the Terriers in terms of thinking about coaching and player development.

“You get concrete information rather than subjective. And the more kids see the results getting better and they see their body changes, they love what’s going on,” Johnston said.

“They love doing it. And the way Carm and his staff break stuff down, there’s a challenge every day for these kids.”

Filice – who offered free Zoom classes after the pandemic forced him to close his facility for in-person training – likens the training process to fine-tuning a car.

“We give them a better engine, better brakes, and then Rick goes in there and tunes the car up,” he said.

“And that’s when the magic happens. We’re on the back end getting kids the strength and timing that they need in order for the technical side to do their work even better than they already do.”

Having access to advanced data backed by expert analysis removes some of the guesswork for coaches, Horton added.

“You can give (players) answers,” he said. “Every player is an individual, but what if you could figure out that individual right off the bat? You could map out four years of training.”

Worth the investment

Having Terriers players train at one of the top sports science centres in North America gives them a competitive advantage.

“You’re just not able to get that anywhere else,” said Horton, who does not know of any other youth baseball program in Canada whose players have access to motion capture analysis and force plate technology.

That convinced Terriers brass it was worth the investment to make training with The Performance Lab standard for all players.

“We’ve built it into the price of the program,” Horton said.

“Every year we go through the budget and see how we can make the program better. Sometimes it’s adding costs, sometimes it’s taking away costs. In this case it was more like, ‘We’ve gotta do this. This has to happen for these players.’”

There is a payoff for the club as well, Johnston added.

College coaches and pro scouts are likely to give Terriers players a longer look since the organization can provide them with reams of quantitative analysis – spin rate, bat speed, exit velocity and other metrics – that could move them up draft boards and bolster their case for Division I programs or Canadian schools.

“It tremendously helps with the recruiting end. And nobody else is doing it,” Johnston said. “We want to differentiate ourselves and use data in the right way, which we feel is going to benefit our program.”

For players who want to go to American colleges, Filice – who worked in California for 10 years before coming home – gives it to them straight.

“We tell the kids, look, from a baseball perspective, your competition is by no means the people you think they are,” he said.

“It’s not the (Ontario Blue) Jays, it’s not the (Toronto) Mets. It’s not anybody in Canada. Your competition, if you’re trying to go to a D1 school, is the kid in Texas, the kid in California who’s not battling the winter like you guys are – who’s literally practising all the time.”

Filice said some Canadian players get to the States unprepared for success since the level of competition jumps dramatically.

“Their perception level of how elite they are, and how much time and effort they have to put into it, is a little skewed,” he said. “Part of it is getting them to understand that and to understand the commitment level they need.”

Performance Lab staff prepare players to be the most experienced in the weight room by teaching them proper technique for a wide variety of lifts.

“We want our kids to be technically the best lifter in the school, or in their baseball program,” Filice said.

“They might not be the kids who can lift the most, but the technique needs to be solid so they don’t feel intimidated in the weight room. We want to give the kids swag – to be able to walk in and say, ‘I got this.’”

‘Ready to go’

That’s how Ben Abram felt the first time the former Terriers standout walked into the weight room at the University of Oklahoma, home of the Division I Sooners.

“I was ready to go as soon as I got on campus,” Abram said.

“We’d been doing some lifts since I was 15 or 16 that they were just teaching the guys who were juniors and seniors at school now. So I had a headstart on a lot of people. That was a big deal – just knowing how to do stuff properly and being well-equipped to do it earlier in my career here.”

Whenever he’s home, the 21-year-old Georgetown, Ont. native drops by The Performance Lab to work out and check in with Filice and his team.

“I love ‘em all to death,” Abram said. “I’ve worked with them for six years now, and I have a very close connection with everybody who works there. They’re great people. Every time I go in, it’s lots of smiles and laughs.”

He said he was “a little nervous” before his first Performance Lab evaluation as a 15-year-old pitcher.

“But they were really professional about everything. Very first class,” he said.

Filice’s team analyzed Abram’s pitching motion using the 3D motion capture and force plate technology, and right away spotted something in his mechanics that needed to change.

“At first it was all about preventing injury. I was super long and lanky, and they basically said, ‘If you keep going on the path you’re on, you’re going to get hurt,’” Abram said.

“So we worked tirelessly to improve those weaknesses, and I didn’t have a problem the rest of my career.”

Over the years, Abram worked with the lab’s strength and conditioning experts to generate more “explosive power” by streamlining his delivery.

“They just make your entire body more efficient, so you’re not straining your arm,” he explained. “You’re using your whole body to deliver the pitch.”

Adding velocity while reducing the wear and tear on his body turned Abram into a more confident pitcher.

“I saw changes in everything. I felt stronger, I felt faster, I was jumping higher, throwing harder,” he said.

“I was finding that I was recovering quicker too, and that might have been the biggest thing. Instead of it taking several days before it felt like I could pitch again, as soon as I started working with them, I felt like I could throw 100 pitches and then come back the next day and close out the game. It was honestly mind-blowing.”

The right-hander was drafted by the San Diego Padres in the 37th round of the 2018 MLB draft but decided to go to college instead. He pitched for Team Canada at the 2019 Pan Am Games and has played in the exclusive Cape Cod League for top collegiate athletes.

Though years removed from the Terriers program, Abram still undergoes an annual analysis of his mechanics at The Performance Lab, a process he says made him a more attractive college recruit and he hopes will again help his stock on draft day.

“It’s honestly just so nice to have a team like that behind me that’s so invested in my own success,” he said.

“And as I am able to continue working with them, I think they’ll give me an opportunity to keep advancing my game and push me further in my career. I can’t thank them enough for that, because they put me in the position I am today.”

‘Straight to business’

As Abram and other Terriers players upped their game, younger players like Elijha Hammill were paying attention.

“(Abram) is a big guy too, he’s big and strong, and he went through the Performance Lab system, so I was really excited to get going with them,” said Hammill, 17, a switch-hitting shortstop from Oakville, Ont., now in his last year with the Terriers.

Hammill started training with The Performance Lab as a 15-year-old in Grade 10 – the same year he first suited up for the Junior National Team – and ate up the extra instruction.

On his first day at the lab, Hammill did a few jumps on the force plates to gauge his explosiveness and took some swings from both sides of the plate so the 3D motion capture could gather baseline data.

Other tools tested his vision and reaction time, and soon Filice had him on a thrice-weekly workout program to improve his flexibility.

“We’d be doing a lot of band work and agility work,” Hammill said. “We got straight to business and I started seeing improvement in my speed and my power.”

Already a fast runner, Hammill found a new gear thanks to hurdle drills that taught continuous movement, plus some slight adjustments to his form that Filice suggested.

He soon saw his 60-yard dash time fall from an average of 6.8 seconds to 6.59, and his stolen base totals shot up in his Grade 10 season.

“I was much, much faster on the basepaths. I just felt an explosiveness,” Hammill said.

Strength training under Filice’s guidance, plus his natural growth as a teenager, helped Hammill become an offensive force

“I started seeing a lot of pop in my bat,” he said.

Those gains only fuelled his desire to get better by spending one to two hours training at home every day, plus workouts at the lab.

“They tell me to do one thing, I see an improvement, and it just gets me so excited. And then we just kept getting better and better as time went on,” Hammill said.

“Working with people who know what they’re talking about just makes me more confident in what I’m doing and more excited to get after it.”

Hammill said working with The Performance Lab has likely raised his stature in the eyes of scouts and college recruiters.

“I don’t know how many other baseball players were doing Olympic lifting like I was, especially at that age. I was just more athletic in the middle of the infield,” he said.

“I was more comfortable, more confident. I just went into every game thinking I’m stronger and better than everyone, and I’ve got to thank Carm for that.

“I’m super thankful for the Terriers and the Performance Lab. It’s just amazing how they help out all the athletes.”

Reaching new heights

Abram had some wise words for Terriers players getting started with The Performance Lab.

“Take in everything they’re saying, because they know what they’re talking about, they’re professionals, and they have your best interest in mind,” he said.

“And just enjoy it, too. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a lot of people. You’re not going to get the option to have a 3D motion capture all the time. I haven’t been able to do it anywhere else but there. So if you can learn something from it, and they can give you a plan to improve your weaknesses, I think you’re giving yourself the best opportunity to succeed.”

Hammill said two-way communication is key to making the most of the experience.

“First off, don’t be afraid to ask questions, because I’ll tell you, if Carm doesn’t have all the answers – and I don’t know why he wouldn’t – someone else there will, and they’ll let you know honestly what they think and what you can work on,” he said.

“Just be open, let them know what you’re thinking and how you feel. They’ll be honest with you, and they’ll help turn you into the best athlete you could possibly be.”