About
I'm Jackson Thorne.
I am a former division 1 pitcher and a doctor of physical therapy student at George Washington University. After nearly a decade of forcing my way into college baseball as a below average high school pitcher, I eventually hit 92 mph and transferred to play D1 baseball. My journey began reading medical studies and listening to hundreds of hours of podcasts as a high school sophomore. By the time my college career ended I had worked at Driveline Baseball, Baseball Performance Center, IHT Human Performance, Atlantic Sports Performance, and 781 Evolution.
Vanguard Training Systems is an approach to developing athletes who explore their genetic ceiling by working both hard enough and smart enough to find out what their potential truly is. If you are willing to work harder than you ever have in your life, then I will give you the exact steps to reach your goals.
Why I coach the way I do.
I pitched 30 Division 1 innings with pronator tenosynovitis, a partial triceps tear, an ulnar avulsion fracture, and a bone spur that grew through both my UCL and my triceps tendon.
After a failed Tommy John surgery as a high school sophomore, I had to rehab myself during the Covid lockdowns and reached 86 mph one year after surgery.
My coaching draws on formal study and hands-on experience. I keep questioning which ideas help a particular athlete and which do not.
I have learned from coaches and athletes across the industry, and I do not want a single template to stand in for an individual assessment. I use the training history, observations, and records an athlete shares to identify priorities, explain the plan, and adjust it as we learn more. When a question calls for diagnosis, treatment, or return-to-sport clearance, that belongs with an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
Why this isn't one facility's idea of training.
Every facility has its own philosophy, its own style, its own structure, and that is exactly why I sought out so many. I'm not a pawn of any single idea.
A program built inside one philosophy inherits its blind spots along with its strengths, and there's no way to see a blind spot from inside it.
- Driveline Baseball
- Pitching Trainer and High Performance Coach
- IHT Human Performance
- Strength and Rehab Coach
- 781 EVO
- Rehab Director
- Atlantic Sports Performance
- Director of Player Development
- Peak Performance Physical Therapy
- Internship
- George Washington University
- Doctoral Student, Physical Therapy
Two of those are motion capture labs I built and ran rather than booked time in: Driveline Baseball and Atlantic Sports Performance.
The piece I almost never see anyone else in this space touch is the functional neurology, the brain balancing I use to clear the compensations holding an athlete back before I ever load them heavier. I learned to work with it at IHT from Jared Slater, who took his own mentorship under Dr. Jared Burton, and Burton is the one who adapted the Carrick Institute's work into functional neurology for performance.
The ask
Apply to train harder than you've ever trained in your entire life.
The application is long on purpose. It's how both of us find out whether this is a fit.