UML Baseball Research Center Started Her on the Path to Head Up R&D at Rawlings
01/01/2024
By Katharine Webster
As a graduate research assistant studying mechanical engineering, Becky O’Hara ’06 learned how to test bats, balls and other gear in UMass Lowell’s Baseball Research Center, the main testing lab for Major League Baseball.
She even helped to develop and validate test procedures for bats used by the NCAA and MLB, working with the center’s new air cannon testing system, which hurls balls at 50 to 200 miles per hour to see how quickly the bats deform, crack or splinter.
“I most enjoyed learning about the intricacies of bat testing and how the testing influences bat design,” O’Hara says. “I also enjoyed interacting with bat engineers from all the major bat brands, as well as representatives from MLB.”
One of those engineers was Art Chou, then vice president for research and development at Rawlings Sporting Goods, which co-sponsored the founding of the Baseball Research Center alongside MLB in 1999. The St. Louis, Missouri, company offered to fund O’Hara’s master’s thesis research: testing and characterizing a wide variety of bat prototypes.
And then Chou offered her a job.
“I was fortunate that they had an opening for a bat engineer at the time that I graduated,” O’Hara says.
Nearly two decades and four promotions later, she is now director of research and development at Rawlings, where she oversees the design of bats, balls, helmets, gloves, chest protectors and other gear for baseball and softball.
But her path to sports engineering wasn’t always so clear.
O’Hara also excelled at ice hockey, playing defense on her high school’s varsity squad and a girls club team, the Rhode Island Panthers. When she was applying to colleges, she looked for schools where she could play hockey competitively while studying engineering.
“Women’s hockey and engineering are not exactly a common pairing, so it limited the schools I could go to,” she says.
McGill University in Montreal had just promoted its women’s ice hockey team from club to varsity status, and O’Hara was offered a spot. The team came in second at nationals one year and third in another. Yet as she finished up her senior season, O’Hara still wasn’t sure exactly what kind of engineering job she wanted.
She started by looking for jobs in biomedical engineering and sports product design. That’s when she ran across an opening for a lab manager at the Baseball Research Center. She knew she wasn’t qualified, but she emailed the center’s founder and director, Prof. James Sherwood, to see if there was another position for which she could apply.
Sherwood, now dean of the Francis College of Engineering and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology, suggested she work in the baseball lab while earning a specialized master’s degree.
“I wasn’t planning on graduate school, but the work in the lab really benefited me,” she says.
O’Hara still plays slow-pitch softball, and she helps to coach her daughter’s softball and son’s hockey teams. She also has maintained her ties to the Baseball Research Center, which continues to test Rawlings equipment for both the company and MLB. And at Sherwood’s invitation, O’Hara has agreed to serve on the external advisory board for SCORE, the UML Sports Collaborative for Open Research and Education.
O’Hara encourages engineering students to take advantage of the new minor in sports engineering, work in the baseball lab and apply for a co-op at Rawlings. The company offers four co-ops each year, which are mostly filled by students from the St. Louis area.
“We’d love to welcome some UMass Lowell students,” she says.