Nick Bonn can throw his fastball up to 100 miles per hour.
For most of his college baseball career, that number would dip down to 92 or 93 mph when he went into the stretch. This March, everything changed when he made a minor mechanical shift in his pitching form which allowed him to throw faster.
It wasn’t a coach or fellow player who caught the necessary change. It was a $500,000 camera system called KinaTrax, an advanced version of motion-tracking visualization technology often seen at the major league level of baseball.
In March 2024, Cal Poly became the seventh college program, and the only mid-major, to adopt the cutting-edge technology, joining Arizona, Arkansas, Auburn, Miami, Stanford and Wake Forest. With KinaTrax, Cal Poly is able to separate itself from most college programs due to its ability to use the data to tweak mechanics to improve performance and prevent injury.
“It sets us apart on the West Coast,” Head Coach Larry Lee said. “I think we all recognize that’s where Major League Baseball is going, and that’s a direction we wanted to go too so our guys could have a better chance.
The staff member managing this half-million-dollar technology is a student: statistics senior Brandon Solari.
Solari is the student director of baseball science for Cal Poly Baseball and is in his third year working for the team. He spent two years as an analyst and has seen his role grow alongside the technology the Mustangs have at their disposal.
When Cal Poly received KinaTrax in 2024, he was among the group tasked with figuring out how to utilize the technology.
“I had no experience with biomechanics or kinesiology stuff before,” Solari said. “Diving into it, I’ve learned a lot, and it’s been super helpful to understand this stuff.”
For Solari, that time has been a learning period as well, as he and the rest of the staff learned to interpret the data and turn it into on-field improvements. The team managers called it a “black box” early on because of how much untapped data was available to them.
“We didn’t really understand it at first. It was a ton of data,” Solari said. “We’ve explored it over the past year and made a lot of progress.”
The team’s starting point is already strong — Cal Poly has gone back to back in 2025 and 2026 as Big West Conference champions.
With over a year of using the KinaTrax at their disposal, players have started to see on-field results from mechanics changes.
How Solari and the staff use KinaTrax
During every home game, Solari and his team of two sit in the press box above home plate, manually activating the 16 KinaTrax cameras installed throughout Baggett Stadium for each individual pitch.
Eight cameras are focused on the pitcher, while the other eight are focused on the hitter.
By the end of the game, there are hundreds of individual files — one for each pitch thrown by a Cal Poly pitcher and for every swing by a Cal Poly batter.
That’s when Cal Poly sends off the video to KinaTrax, a technology company owned by Hawk-Eye Innovations, a Sony-backed organization involved in data collection for the MLB, NBA, NFL and other major sports leagues.
KinaTrax, which has camera systems installed in more than 75 stadiums, according to its website, processes the raw data and, less than a day later, sends it back to Solari and the Cal Poly staff.
“Actually seeing the visual — and we’re able to put it side by side and overlay it as well, so you can see the difference — has been a huge breakthrough.”
— Brandon Solari, Student Director of Baseball Science at Cal Poly Baseball
The numbers Solari sees aren’t what the players or even the coaches look at.
Initially, even he didn’t know how to interpret the complex data Cal Poly receives, so now he distills the raw numbers into a more digestible report for the coaches.
“I think our coaches are old school,” Solari said. “They definitely use numbers, but I think a lot of stuff is eye test as well. And so with KinaTrax, it almost combines both of those.”
That information then gets interpreted yet again by the coaches, so by the time the players see it, it’s been converted into baseball language centered on their mechanics that they can implement.
“We’re trying to transition [the data] into a feeling for the player, more than anything,” Pitching Coach Seth Moir said. “I think the more simple you can make it for them, the easier the transitions will be.”
Before Solari even truly understood the data when Cal Poly received KinaTrax in 2024, his first task was creating a baseline profile for each player’s mechanics during the offseason.
Now, the team uses its “stock” data as a comparison if any issues arise during the season.
Early impacts
Bonn became Cal Poly’s closer after transferring from Dallas Baptist this season. Using the KinaTrax data, the coaching staff noticed he wasn’t fully tucking his pelvis on his delivery, which was limiting the power he could generate on his pitches. The change was so minuscule, he said, only KinaTrax could have caught it.
“It was nothing you could really see out of the naked eye,” Bonn said.
After trying out his adjusted throwing motion, the difference was immediate.
“It changed everything,” Bonn said. “My [velocity] was back up to normal, like how it was out the wind up, and I was five miles per hour higher.”
Bonn took a massive leap after making the change at the beginning of the year, and finished the season with a conference-leading 15 saves after struggling at Pepperdine and Dallas Baptist in his previous three campaigns. He is the first Cal Poly pitcher to reach 100 mph on a pitch in program history.
Mechanics are incredibly important for Bonn specifically, who has a 6-foot-1, 160-pound frame, much smaller than most who touch triple digits in pitch speeds.
Because of that, Bonn needs to be hyper-aware of his motions, because moving as fast as he does when throwing can make him more susceptible to injury.
“Any time you’re moving that fast at that weight, it means there’s a higher likelihood something could be off,” Moir said.
Dylan Kordic’s offensive breakthrough
The Mustangs have seen KinaTrax’s effect at the plate as well.
After struggling early in the season, graduate student Dylan Kordic has been one of Cal Poly’s best hitters after making a change based on KinaTrax.
Kordic’s batting average was .143 after the Mustangs concluded a four-game series against the University of Southern California on Feb. 28. As of May 29, in part due to mechanical changes based on KinaTrax data, he has raised his average to .299.
“At the beginning of the season … we got a lot of data on him, and he was running cold,” Solari said. “That definitely helped seeing like, okay, what are his numbers at the beginning of the season, and then when he started to get hot, what are his numbers looking like then?”
Kordic was also dealing with a knee injury to start the season, as he was about 60% healthy, according to Lee.
Using KinaTrax, Solari noticed Kordic was overcompensating for the injury by flattening out his swing, which decreased the lift he could get on the ball. During his early-season slump, Kordic had a majority of swings at around a five-degree attack angle with his bat.
Solari found when Kordic was closer to a 10-degree angle, more of his swings resulted in balls lifted out of the infield.
Since focusing more on the change, Kordic has earned career bests in slugging percentage, extra-base hits and home runs this season.
“Being able to pick it up at game speed is huge,” Kordic said. “Even in video from a game, you can’t see what KinaTrax is providing.”
What made Cal Poly a fit?
Out of the seven programs to adopt the technology nationwide, Cal Poly was the first school on the West Coast. That puts the Mustangs in front of elite programs like UCLA, USC, Oregon State and UC Santa Barbara, which have all been in or around the national rankings in recent years.
The Mustangs were among a larger pool of college programs placed on a list by Major League Baseball as potential candidates to acquire KinaTrax, according to Mike Wickham, the senior associate athletic director of business and finance at Cal Poly.
After MLB pitched the technology to the school, Cal Poly Athletics turned to its donors, who provided the initial funding needed to purchase and install all of KinaTrax’s equipment in Baggett Stadium.
Wickham credited the aggressiveness and strength of Cal Poly Baseball’s donor base for being early adopters.
“When you’re at state school, you’re always navigating budget challenges, and we would never be able to fund something like KinaTrax with state dollars,” Wickham said.
According to Wickham, the technology is subsidized by the MLB, meaning Cal Poly doesn’t have to pay the $75,000 yearly fee for maintenance or data processing.
“It makes you feel really good, knowing that the community cares, the coaches care and it’s only going to make you better,” Kordic said. “It’s something that a lot of places don’t have.”
This was a major reason the technology was pitched to Cal Poly, Wickham said. With nationally recognized programs such as Oregon State, UC Santa Barbara and USC all coming into Baggett Stadium, MLB teams get to see the raw numbers of players they may have interest in.
The future of technology in baseball
Soon after KinaTrax was implemented at Baggett Stadium, there were some initial questions about how to incorporate the data into Cal Poly’s on-field play.
“I was doing really well at the time, and I was like, ‘Why change anything?’” Bonn said. “I just want to be the best I can, so any opportunity to change something, if it’s going to benefit me in the end, is worth it.”
While early hesitation is normal, using data to improve performance in sports is nothing new, even at the college level. Most collegiate programs will offer tracking technologies, including Trackman or Rapsodo, which provide similar datasets based on captured swings and pitches but lack the ability to incorporate visuals alongside the datasets.
Both Moir and Wickham have experience working with MLB teams, and drew parallels between the technology being used there and what Cal Poly’s staff has access to.
“Seth [Moir], especially when calling the game plan … has probably similar to better [data] than what we were producing with the Mets at the big league level,” Wickham said. “I think we’re one of the better schools at synthesizing the data and using it for on-field success.”
KinaTrax is just one of many technological advancements in baseball in recent years. Other notable changes include the pitch clock and the automated ball-strike system, more commonly known as ABS.
The pitch clock, which is now used at the NCAA level, is designed to make baseball games quicker by limiting the time between each pitch to 20 seconds. ABS is a high-tech system designed to assist umpires with calling balls and strikes, rather than replacing them.
KinaTrax has had a similar progression to ABS: it started at the professional level, then spread throughout baseball. In 2013, the New York Mets became the first team to install the technology. The first-ever fully recorded game by KinaTrax came just two years later, in a matchup between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Washington Nationals.
KinaTrax now has partnerships with 15 MLB teams, and schools like Cal Poly are among the first to bring it to college baseball.
Despite all of the advancements made since the technology was implemented, there are still more steps to fully utilize everything KinaTrax has to offer.
One of those steps is adding a feature that allows the staff to see live, in-game data, rather than sending the files to KinaTrax and getting them back hours later.
“Once we get [live KinaTrax data], I think that will be game-changing,” Solari said.
In the future, Solari would like to implement weekly mechanical reports so the team can see significant variables and changes throughout a game and create predictive models that monitor pitchers’ mechanics to know if they are fatigued.
Currently, Cal Poly Baseball has a team of three managing KinaTrax. Solari believes expanding to a team of five would be ideal.
“I think we need to keep the team somewhat small in order to keep it focused and all be on the same page,” Solari said.
Despite being home to back to back conference champions, the integration of technology and sports at Baggett Field is just getting started.
“I think we’re maybe two or three years away [from seeing the full benefits],” Solari said. “Someone told me a few weeks ago that we’re five to ten years away. I don’t think that’s true.”