Students Swing for the Fences with New Sports Engineering Minor

01/01/2024
By Katharine Webster

The newest minor in the Francis College of Engineering lineup, sports engineering, is quickly gaining points with students. 

That is because it is the first program of its kind for undergraduates in the United States, says Engineering Dean James Sherwood, a leading sports equipment researcher, director of the UMass Lowell Baseball Research Center and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology.

“Because we have the baseball lab, we routinely get inquiries from high school kids and their parents asking if they can study sports engineering here,” Sherwood says. “This should draw people from all over the U.S. It’s also a good draw for Division I athletes.” 

The new minor, which kicked off this spring with a dozen students taking the introductory sports engineering course, offers six areas of focus that are based on a student’s engineering major, their primary career interest or both. For example, someone majoring in chemical or plastics engineering may choose to focus on sports materials in the minor, taking classes such as Polymers in Sports. The other areas of focus are biomechanics, sports electronics, sports product design, sports engineering mechanics and sports infrastructure. 

“A student who really wants to get a job in sports engineering needs to be familiar with the social side—the business of sports, sports psychology, physiology and health as well as politics, race and gender in sports.” -Patrick Drane, assistant director of the Baseball Research Center

Students in the minor also choose electives from a wide range of sports-related classes outside engineering, including Introduction to Exercise Science, Philosophy of Sport, Biology for Engineers, Business Law for Engineers and The Culture of American Sport.

“A student who really wants to get a job in sports engineering needs to be familiar with the social side—the business of sports, sports psychology, physiology and health as well as politics, race and gender in sports,” says Patrick Drane ’00, ’03, assistant director of the Baseball Research Center and an executive committee member for the International Sports Engineering Association. 

Drane worked with Sherwood to design the new minor, and he teaches the introductory class. As seniors, all students in the minor will complete a sports-related capstone project within their major, he says. 

While the minor is new, many of the scores of UML engineering students who have interned or worked as research assistants in the Baseball Research Center—founded in 1999 under the sponsorship of Major League Baseball, which uses the lab as its primary testing center, and Rawlings Sporting Goods—have gone on to intern and work for sporting goods companies, including New Balance. 

Becky O’Hara ’06, who worked as a graduate research assistant in the baseball lab while completing her master’s degree in mechanical engineering, got hired as a bat engineer by Rawlings right after she graduated. She is now director of research and development at the company, which sends baseball and softball bats, balls, helmets and other protective equipment to the baseball lab for testing. 

O’Hara says that Rawlings and other companies in the sports equipment industry will be eager to hire engineering graduates with some understanding of business, data analytics, human performance and athletes. Rawlings, in St. Louis, Missouri, also offers four co-ops a year for which UML students can apply.

“We’re developing products for athletes, so anything that helps our engineers better understand our customers and their needs is beneficial for us,” says O’Hara. 

Drane and Sherwood say there will also be plenty of other sports-related research opportunities for students, working with faculty who study materials, biosensors, human performance, smart fabrics and more.

The minor builds on other programs on campus, including the new minor in sports studies offered through the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. It also pairs off with the two-year-old Sports Collaborative for Open Research and Education (SCORE), a university-wide initiative that brings together faculty, staff, students and external partners involved in sports-related research and coursework, athletics and experiential opportunities on and off campus. 

Ryan Donnelly, a junior mechanical engineering major and captain of the UML Swim & Dive Club team, says that if the sports engineering minor had been offered when he was a first-year student, he might have signed up. The experience he is getting as a paid undergraduate research assistant in the Baseball Research Center is already giving him a taste of what the minor aims to achieve: integrating different aspects of sports engineering in a career-related setting. 

“This is a pretty cool gig. The research we do, especially equipment performance testing and the composites aspect of it, introduces you to aspects of engineering you wouldn’t get just in the classroom,” Donnelly says. 

“The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this position are the soft skills,” he says. “In all my classes, we focus a lot on math, theory and formal reports, and those are important. But here, we actually practice the art that is technical writing, putting results into a form that’s easy for someone to analyze and know what’s occurring—and that’s just as important.”