It’s been three years in development but the announcement by Little League Baseball makes it official: PowerChalk.com - motion analysis for blue collar athletes - is here.
PowerChalk represents a lifetime of cross training. It’s the answer to the question – “What do you get when you cross a programmer with a little league baseball coach?”
I’m Chaz Henry and I started writing the ChalkTalk telestrator after a week of golf school in Orlando where I saw my swing on video for the first time. Weeks prior, in lessons with my local pro, he told me much of what I saw on tape but I didn’t make the suggested adjustments.
The key word is told as like many athletes and students, I’m more visual than auditory. I didn’t believe how outside-in my swing was until I saw it. Seeing my swing against the lines of the ideal swing plane did more for my golf game than any lesson I’ve taken before or since.
Once home, I knew that video analysis would be the perfect tool for the little league team that I coached. I can see in the eyes of my kids that they don’t get much of what I try to show them on the field (much like me on the driving range). When I priced the system they used in Orlando (V1 Golf), I found that it costs thousands of dollars. That was hardly within the range of the average rec league baseball team.
It turns out that V1 and the other best seller, Dartfish are PC based. You have to install the software and all of the necessary video codecs on your machine. It’s a nightmare of configuration and when I tried the Dartfish demo (218 megabytes!), it locked up my machine. As a thirty year programmer, I knew there was a better way.
Enter PowerChalk
I’ve wrote the ChalkTalk Telestrator - the markup and voiceover tool in PowerChalk - to bring video analysis to regular, rec-league athletes and coaches. PowerChalk is web based. It runs completely in a browser and it doesn’t cost thousands of dollars. It’s my hope that it will reach recreational league coaches (like me) and will bring instruction and insights to kids all over the world. Oddly enough, the first organization that licensed it was a Major League Baseball team.I believe our job as coaches is to advance player skills and to transfer our knowledge and enthusiasm for the game. As the first beta tester, PowerChalk has helped me do both.
I hope you find the site useful and I welcome your input.
I was impressed with your diagram of your pitching mound, what's your opinion on the best covering to use?
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