The Kid From Jefferson County Rewiring How St. Louis Trains

The screen at the far end of the cage says two outs, runner on second. The hitter digging in is 12 years old, and on any given Tuesday evening at Center STL on Langley Avenue, this is what a Movement 4 Power lesson looks like: a simulated at-bat with a live spray chart and situational scoring, and a system logging every batted ball — exit velocity, launch angle, where the ball would have landed on a real field, whether the imaginary runner scores. He isn't taking swings. He's competing.

A sensor on his bat has been keeping its own book all session — bat speed, attack angle, how efficiently the barrel got on plane — swing by swing. A camera holds his last round in slow motion, ready to sit next to film of what a correct move looks like, or next to his own swing from a month ago. If it's an assessment day, a pair of iPads have captured his whole body in three dimensions, no suit and no markers, and turned the swing into a readable report on how his hips, torso, and hands actually sequence. And when the session ends, none of it evaporates: the numbers feed a written evaluation and a four-week plan his parents can hold in their hands.

The rare part isn't the technology. It's the address.

None of these tools are exotic at the top of the sport. Rapsodo units track pitches and batted balls in professional and college facilities. HitTrax simulators, Blast Motion and Diamond Kinetics bat sensors, markerless 3D motion capture — the big development organizations have built programs around this equipment for years, and they charge accordingly, often thousands of dollars for access.

What's genuinely rare is finding the full stack running in an ordinary weeknight lesson in South County, priced for regular families. That isn't an accident of Movement 4 Power's business model. It is the business model — and it traces directly back to where its founder grew up.

The kid from Hillsboro

Connor Jenkins is a Hillsboro High School graduate who grew up in Jefferson County — close enough to St. Louis to see what the city's development scene offered, and far enough away to see who it left out. The big organizations up in the city had the technology, the data, the structured programs, and price tags that ran into the thousands. Athletes from low-income families in his county weren't just priced out of that world; many never knew it existed.

His own path ran through the game anyway. Jenkins played his college ball at St. Louis Community College and earned a professional contract offer from the Milwaukee Brewers. Away from the field, he earned a degree in cybersecurity, finishing at the top of his class, and became a serial entrepreneur — M4P is one of multiple companies he owns. Which is to say: when he decided the access gap in St. Louis youth baseball was a solvable problem, he had both the playing résumé to know what real development looks like and the operator's background to build it.

"I grew up watching kids from my hometown get quietly told that real development was for families who could write a four-figure check," says Jenkins, founder of M4P and High School Director at Southside Prospects. "The big organizations weren't wrong about the technology — they were wrong about who gets access to it. Every kid deserves the same measurement, the same structured plan, and the same honest coaching, no matter what their parents make. That's the reason M4P exists, and it's the standard I hold it to."

The staff he built around it

Jenkins didn't staff the cage with part-timers reading a script. Zane Roos, a Lindbergh High School product who also played at St. Louis Community College, is a two-time Conference Gold Glove winner who hit .343 across his college career — a corner athlete who teaches defense with the same seriousness he brings to the swing.

Andrew Zoellner brings more than a decade of coaching experience across pitching and hitting, including work as a USA Baseball coach with a track record of developing youth athletes — the staff's veteran program-builder.

And the softball side is not baseball with the labels swapped. Prisha Nigam, who plays softball at Webster University, gives M4P's softball athletes fastpitch-specific, data-driven coaching — hitters coached as fastpitch hitters, with the same measurement stack behind them.

What the machines measure, translated for parents

If you're a parent standing behind the cage, here is the honest version of what each tool does and why it matters.

• Rapsodo tracks the ball itself — pitch velocity, spin, and break profiles on the mound; exit velocity, launch angle, and ball flight at the plate.
• HitTrax turns the cage into a simulated game: live spray charts, situational scoring, at-bats with something on the line. The goal is a cage environment so close to game speed and game pressure that actual games feel comfortable — athletes who compete in here thrive out there.
• Blast Motion and Diamond Kinetics ride on the bat: bat speed, rotational acceleration, attack angle, hand speed, time to contact — swing-by-swing feedback instead of guesswork.
• Uplift Capture is 3D motion capture from one or two iPhones or iPads — no wearables, no suit. It tracks 28 points on the body, builds full 3D kinematics and the kinematic sequence, and turns it into a report a parent can actually read. It's the same category of tool MLB organizations and colleges use.
• Side-by-side video puts the athlete's slow-motion film next to a correct model — or next to their own earlier swing — so athlete and parent both see what needs to change and what right looks like.

The framing that holds it together runs through everything M4P does: measurement serves coaching. The number tells you what is happening; the coach and the film tell you why, and what to do about it. That's why the data feeds a written evaluation and a four-week plan instead of dying on a screen — and why the side-by-side video matters so much, because a parent who can see the difference between their athlete's move and the correct one stops paying for reps on faith.

The full equipment rundown lives on M4P's training technology page; the movement-assessment side is covered under biomechanics screening.

The Southside Prospects partnership

In late August, the operation took its biggest structural step yet: Movement 4 Power is now the official training arm of Southside Prospects, and Jenkins has stepped in as the club's High School Director. For club families, the meaning is straightforward — the club season and the development behind it now run on the same philosophy, with Southside athletes plugged directly into the measurement-first training environment described above. Details are on the Southside Prospects partnership page.

The media side: Inside The Game STL × Live Stream STL

This story is itself part of the same push. Inside The Game STL — the media brand of Devoted Athletics — publishes local coverage in partnership with Live Stream STL, which broadcasts St. Louis-area games live. The two halves are meant to work together: development that makes local athletes better, and coverage that makes sure people actually see them play.

Seven months in

Movement 4 Power is seven months old. Twenty-eight athletes train there every week, across more than 50 weekly sessions, out of Center STL at 6727 Langley Ave. The Google Business Profile went up roughly two weeks ago and already holds a 5.0-star rating across 13 reviews — which, for a business that runs no fake-urgency marketing, is the growth engine in one sentence: parents telling other parents.

None of that proves the model is finished scaling. It proves the demand was always there — that families in South County and Jefferson County wanted exactly what the big organizations were selling, at a price that didn't shut them out. If you want to see it for yourself, the front door is the same for everyone: book an assessment, or start with hitting lessons in St. Louis.

Inside The Game STL · A Devoted Athletics brand.