Right after pitching this past spring for Pfeiffer University’s baseball team, Cooper Hyatt ’27 contributed to cutting-edge research that affects his position on the diamond.

Throughout much of the summer break, he interned at the Wake Forest Pitching Lab in Winston-Salem, N.C., having secured a coveted spot in the Biomedical Engineering and Informatics Summer Research Internship Program in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

“I love baseball, and I have a passion for science,” said Hyatt, a Waxhaw, N.C. resident who’s tailored his Chemistry major to include biochemistry topics. “I was looking around for something meaningful to do over the summer, and this internship fit the bill.”

During his time at the Pitching Lab, Hyatt compared pitchers with high arches and pitchers with flat feet to see if there were “any major differences” between the groups when it came to pitching mechanics “up the kinetic chain” or to the length and width of the strides taken during the pitching delivery.

These elements make an important difference for successful pitchers. Stride length has been defined as the “distance covered by the pitcher’s leading foot from its initial position to where it makes contact with the mound.” Stride width has been defined as “the horizontal distance between the front and back foot at the moment the front foot makes contact with the ground.” Both stride measurements affect such factors as velocity and efficiency, as does the kinetic chain.

Ultimately, the Pitching Lab seeks to determine “how foot structure affects pitching mechanics and if certain arch types are more prone to injury or have a greater impact on performance.”

Hyatt concluded, in a nutshell, that there were no significant differences between pitchers with high arches and those with flat feet in his examination of the length and width of strides taken during the pitching motion. More research is needed to come to a similar conclusion concerning mechanics up the kinetic chain, he said.

Hyatt’s clearly impressed with the technology he encountered during his internship, which included 16 high-speed cameras and motion capture markers as well as computers capable of generating sophisticated models.

“Research about pitching has been around for decades at this point,” he said. “But recent technological advancements, which I saw in play at the Wake Forest Pitching Lab, have been able to advance that research significantly.”

Hyatt calls his work at the Pitching Lab “his first big introduction into scientific research.” He praised Dr. David Cartrette, Pfeiffer’s Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for Chemistry, for encouraging him to pursue it. He said that Dr. Kristen Faith Nicholson — Associate Professor, Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation in the Wake Forest University School of Medicine — effectively mentored him during the internship.

As Hyatt prepares to begin his junior year at Pfeiffer, he’s keeping his options open. He’s contemplating entering the medical profession, perhaps as a doctor. And he’s considering building on what he did at the Wake Forest Pitching Lab by pursuing research work at the graduate level. “I’ve been given some great experience in research through this internship,” Hyatt said. “I also have a better understanding of what’s out there, research-wise.”