Multi-Year Analysis of Investment and Results

Case Study on Time and Budget Spent for Hitting Gains

 September 12, 2024

Investment and Results in Division I

Spending Budget and Practice Time on uHIT Separates Client from Competitors

This post analyzes the investment and results in Division I from uHIT training. A Division I Softball client of deCervo has used uHIT incrementally over three years (2022-24). Following a successful trial in 2022, our client devoted more resources and practice time to uHIT Custom in 2023. In 2024, the client deepened its relationship with deCervo and used our new product for learning opposition pitcher tendencies, uHIT Gameday. Over those three seasons, we noted gains in OPS and other offense metrics. These gains were both year-over-year and against competitors in Division I. We will not identify this particular client here, but you can view comparable gains in OPS and other metrics for Division I clients here.

This post on investment and results in Division I also aims to answer a daunting question for any coach. ‘How do I decide what to invest in for my hitters?’ This is the question many coaches face when balancing essential purchases (like travel, food and equipment) and what is still considered ‘extra’. We hope this post makes it clear for coaches where the essential investments must be, if hitting consistently and winning are the goals.

As always, we answer this question with data and observation of what has worked for clients. In this case, we focus on a Division I Softball client. We look at their investments made in time and money (which uHIT subscriptions and for how long). Then we compare those investments over years against those made by their competition. The result is a simple analysis for a Division I (or other) coach in either softball or baseball to follow when picking how his / her resources will be spent in the coming season.

What Investments Were Made

The Time Investment

Every college coach worries about having enough time in practice. The “20/8 hour rule” limits time spent in-season to 20 hours weekly and out-of-season to 8 hours per week. This analysis of investment and results in Division I would not be complete if we did not consider this important challenge in time management. If we consider a 4-month fall (out-of) season and a 4-month spring (in-) season then we get about 144 total possible hours of practice time each year. Against this ceiling, let’s look at what our Division I client invested in uHIT training.

Above, we start the comparison 1 year before our client used uHIT. Our client is shown in green and the Division I competitors are in red. In 2021, like their competitors, they had invested no time in uHIT. But in 2022, they invested 22 hours as a team in a combination of uHIT Custom and uHIT Plus. Again, in 2023, they augmented that time investment to 24 hours with these two products. And in 2024, they swapped in uHIT Gameday to complement uHIT Plus, totaling 48 hours of uHIT training.

How We Calculate Time Investment

As a side note, we generally do not provide time invested in uHIT as an in-app or on-Dashboard analytic. Rather, we help hitters and coaches gauge usage with the number of pitches trained in uHIT. For the purpose of the above graph, we measured an ~8-second gap between pitches on average and multiplied by the total pitches seen on this client’s uHIT Dashboard. The conversions for the above were as follows:

• 2021: 0 pitches (0 hours)
• 2022: 9,675 pitches (22 hours)
• 2023: 11,001 pitches (24 hours)
• 2024: 21,603 pitches (48 hours)

Below, we examine the investments made in budget in tandem.

The Budget Investment

In tandem with the time investment, our Division I client made comparable budget investments in uHIT. A complete analysis of the investment and results in Division I needs this economic perspective too. The figure below shows investment in dollars ($) each year in green against the competition in red.

Again, we include 2021 (the pre-uHIT year) as a baseline. Starting the following year, the investments in uHIT were:

• 2022: $1,046
• 2023: $2,866
• 2024: $2,818*

The 2022 season consisted of 10 hitters working uHIT Custom for 3 months in-season. In 2023, the usage expanded in scope and time. There were 10 hitters working uHIT Custom and 12 hitters working uHIT Plus over 6 months. In 2024, the client auditioned uHIT Gameday in-season at a discount while we were fine-tuning it (*). There were 5 hitters working uHIT Custom and 16 hitters working uHIT Plus in the fall. In the spring, there were 10 hitters (all starters) working uHIT Gameday in-season, while another 10 hitters worked uHIT Plus.

Even though it appears the client investment decreased in 2024, this effect is largely due to the early-adopter discount on uHIT Gameday. The number of total hitter-months is higher in 2024 than 2023. So without this discount, the budget investment would have been higher in 2024 than in 2023.

What Results Were Seen

The SLG Return-on-Investment

For SLG and all other hitting metrics, we collected Division I Softball competitor info for approximately 2,390 Division I Softball programs. Here, we shift our analysis on-field in this look at investment and results in Division I. We omitted any other teams using uHIT from this pool of competitors. From there, we computed the mean team values of SLG and other hitting metrics. We compare our client’s team SLG to its Division I competitors for all 3 years of uHIT investment, including the baseline year of 2021. The first result we see is from slugging percentage (SLG) below.

Starting in 2022, we see an increasing separation between our client and the 2,390 Division I competitors not using uHIT training. This client was slightly above average in SLG to begin with in 2021 (.406 to a mean of .399). With the addition of uHIT training, we saw the beginning of a breakout to this team’s extra-base hitting. This first year of change illustrates a good point. If a team’s hitting approach is delivering good results already, there is still room for improvement that may yet be untapped.

As we get into 2023 and 2024, we see the SLG separation getting more drastic. Our client’s hitting soared +66 points and +135 points above the mean competition these years. Simultaneously, we noted increased hitter-months of the uHIT training and a switch in 2024 to uHIT Gameday.

The OBP Return-on-Investment

We did a similar analysis for on-base percentage (OBP). Comparing our client to the 2,390 competitor programs, we begin from a different starting point. Here, our client was below average in 2021 before uHIT. Specifically, our client was -24 points below average in OBP. In 2022, we began the 3 years of uHIT investment and we see them exceed the mean in 2022, blowing past it in the following years. Below we see see the trend for OBP before and during uHIT training.

In 2023 and 2024, we see our client’s ability to get on-base exceed the competition. Our client beat the mean in 2023 by +45 points. In 2024, they beat their Division I competitors by +56 points, exceeding a team OBP of .400 for the first time. For any team concerned with creating opportunities for run production, this result is essential. If you can guarantee runners on base 40% of the time then you are putting your team in a good position to win offensively.

The OPS Return-on-Investment

The OPS is a sum of the on-base percentage (OBP) and slugging percentage (SLG). So trends from comparing our client to the 2,390 competitor programs above will transfer here. Still, we make a point of highlighting the on-base plus slugging (OPS) percentage change because this is a recurrent on-field metric we use to track uHIT training’s impact on hitter decisions (see here and here). As the graph below shows in 2021, our client was -17 points below average before training with uHIT. And in 2022, it all turned around with the beginning of uHIT training.

The OPS is one of the most consistent measurements of on-field hitting. It correlates to runs scored (see here) and to pro player salary (see here). If we look at the SLG and OBP trends that precede this one, we see an emerging composite between them to form the graph above for OPS. Our client’s correlate to runs scored took off in 2023 (+100 points above mean) and 2024 (+190 points above mean). While we have not analyzed the economic impact of OPS in Division I sports yet, the relationship between OPS and pro player salary shows the potential for better recruitment and donor participation with this greater offensive capability. (As a side note, in this particular client’s case, we have confirmed a +40% increase in their uHIT training investment for 2024-25. This indicates the possibility of greater donor participation to support this added expense above last season.)

The Total Bases Return-on-Investment

Finally, for the last offense metric, we examine total bases (TB) for our client against the competition. (We examine this metric because runs scored was unavailable for the 2,390 Division I teams sampled.) TB is highly correlated to runs scored though. So we close our analysis of on-field impact from uHIT training by looking at this statistic for our client against the mean competition. Below we show the trend again from pre-uHIT (2021) through three years of our training (2022-24).

Much like OBP, our client was below the mean in total bases (TB) during 2021. Following the OBP trend in 2022, our client closed in on the mean. And by 2023, our client was netting +86 more bases than its mean competition. This trend continued in 2024 with our client taking +126 more bases than the mean. Once again, we confirm the impact of uHIT training in making run production more likely. Our client took more bases each year than the competition, allowing them the greater chance of scoring more runs. There is no greater priority of a team’s offense than to get more runners taking more bases. In this analysis, we show a pre-/post effect of doing this with uHIT, in addition to how those changes compared to the non-training mean competition.

Deciding on Hitting Investments