Why Mookie Betts is backing this Elk Grove startup’s wearable sports tech
As the Los Angeles Dodgers prepare to face the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series starting Friday, All-Star outfielder Mookie Betts is crediting a Sacramento-area sports tech startup with helping him keep his edge.
Core Impact, an Elk Grove-based sports technology and data science company, is launching an athletic apparel line that tracks live muscle performance and delivers real-time feedback through a synchronized app.
Following years of research and development, founder and CEO Samuel Taylor formally launched the company in August 2020. Five years later, its compression-fit, tech-enabled athletic wear is set to debut this month.
“Core impact is a sports technology company, and we track muscle activity, but we provide real time feedback so that we can allow each and any athlete to become more effective while they’re training, so they can reach their performance goals faster,” Taylor said. “Instead of you getting your data in 20 minutes, 20 hours, 24 hours, you get your data in two seconds.”
According to its website, the company aims to improve athletic performance and reduce injuries by producing sports-specific wearables that offer actionable data to athletes, coaches and trainers.
One of its early adopters is Betts, the Dodgers star and eight-time All-Star, who became an investor after using the product himself. He saw the potential for it to help athletes fine-tune their movement — especially when things aren’t clicking.
“I’m an investor in it, but it’s more of an investment in Sam,” Betts said. “Obviously I love the product, and I believe in it. I think it’ll be used across the board in all sports because it’s that good.”
Born from a moment in the batting cage
The idea behind Core Impact goes back more than 30 years to a spring training session in 1994. Taylor, then a professional baseball player with the California Angels, had a conversation with coach Joe Maddon that stayed with him.
“I was hitting off of the tee and (Maddon) walked up to me. … He goes, ‘Sam, you should never hit under .300’,” Taylor said. “ Me, being the smartass I was, I said, ‘well, I am, so what advice can you give me?’”
Maddon responded: “He goes, ‘well if I knew what was going on inside your body, I’d be able to tell you, but since I don’t go down to the batting cage and figure it out.’ That thought process kind of stuck with me.”
That interaction became the seed for a big idea.
“How do you take the guesswork out of your athletic performance?,” Taylor said. “How do you stop guessing what your performance is versus knowing what your performance is going to be?”
That question led to the founding of Core Impact and its goal to, in Taylor’s words, “make the invisible visible.”
“The same issue that I had when I played, it’s the same current issue that exists today,” Taylor said.
A pivotal tool in Betts’ turnaround
Betts, a three-time World Series champion and the 2018 American League MVP, began using Core Impact earlier this year when his performance hit a slump.
At the All-Star break, he was hitting .244 with 11 home runs in 89 games — far below his usual production.
“For a while I was not playing very well,” Betts said.
With help from Core Impact, he said he was able to diagnose inefficiencies in how his muscles were firing during his swing. Through the company app synced with the apparel, Betts received performance feedback that he could apply to tweak some of the miscues and misfires that were happening with his muscles while swinging.
“Core Impact definitely had played a role in my change in the season,” Betts said. “Putting it on let me know where I was with my muscles and how they were firing, where they were firing from. It gave me a direction as to where I need to focus and what I need to focus on.”
In the second half of the season, Betts batted .279 with 67 hits, 9 homers and 37 RBIs. Over the final two months of the season, he batted .317 with an .892 OPS.
“It’s not necessarily like actually helping me hit the ball,” Betts said about the Core Impact product. “But it is definitely helping me understand how my body’s moving, how it’s operating. And in order for me to get back on track, I need to be using these muscles, and they need to be firing it on all cylinders. It definitely helped me get on the right track and eventually back to normal.”
Betts’ tweak sparked a hot streak that happened right in time for the playoffs as the defending World Series champion Dodgers look to become the first team to win back-to-back championships this century after downing the Reds, Phillies and Brewers to reach the championship.
“It’s really important to understand that it’s not going to necessarily help you directly play the game better. It’s not going to help give you these types of superpowers or something,” Betts, the 2018 American League MVP, said. “But what it does do is it helps you equate feeling and what’s real. I think it’s going to revolutionize everything because athletes will now be able to correlate what feelings they have in their legs or their body in real time.”
What the product does
After retiring from baseball, Taylor earned a bachelor’s degree in Black studies at the University of San Francisco in 2012, where he also studied exercise science and kinesiology. That academic background helped him develop the Core Impact platform.
The company’s flagship product — dubbed the “ecosuit” — uses EMG (electromyography) sensors embedded in compression gear to monitor targeted muscle groups and provide live feedback via a mobile app.
He said the product is designed to help decrease injuries from overuse of muscles and eliminate improper body movement to advance muscle recovery.
“We call it our ecosuit,” he said. “Anytime you’re wearing this product, the way it differentiates is through EMG sensors that are placed in specific muscle groups that you want to monitor. They are placed on individual body parts that you want to utilize in order to monitor that data.”
Other professional athletes using the product include Miles Williams and pitcher Matt Manning, a Sacramento native now in the Phillies farm system.
Williams said the product helps him better understand the mechanics of his swing.
“What’s great about the sensor is when I can get immediate feedback from my progression in my swing,” Williams said. “So that’s what’s really cool about the sensors and Core Impact, it’s like a really immediate thing. The immediate feedback will tell me if I’m green or red. Red is bad. Green is good. So for me, if I see that, I know that I have to engage my arms more or keep my scalp loaded longer so that everything is green.”
Taylor said it works for kinetic movements for nearly every sport, including tennis, volleyball, baseball, basketball, football, golf, softball, lacrosse and hockey.
What’s next for Core Impact
Core Impact’s athletic wear is expected to go on sale at the end of October, Taylor said. Retail pricing starts at $1,499, with wholesale options starting at $799 for team and institutional orders.
Although it’s being used by high-level athletes, Taylor said the product is for anyone who wants to track their muscle use while engaging in certain movements.
“Any athlete that wants to be better than they were yesterday, they should wear this,” Taylor said. “Just because you’re not a professional or collegiate athlete or you’re not making money for it doesn’t mean that you’re less competitive. It’s for any sort of athlete or athlete within that actually wants to utilize the product and get better. That’s what this is about.”
Taylor said he’s exploring options with MLB teams, Georgetown University, UC Davis, the University of San Francisco and UC Berkeley. An additional footwear line is expected to launch in January, Taylor said.
Betts said his support is rooted not only in the product — but in Taylor’s long-term vision.
“It’s more important just to understand the people that I embed with and their viewpoint, where we want to go,” Betts said. “I think our views are aligned, and I think the sky is really the limit at this point for us.”
Pre-orders for the wears are now available at coreimpactinc.com.
