‘Starting to click’: How Georgia Tech’s Vahn Lackey transformed his hitting game

When Georgia Tech baseball coach James Ramsey came to watch Vahn Lackey play as a senior at Collins Hill, Lackey wasn’t gripping the bat correctly.

It wasn’t egregious, but Ramsey, Tech’s hitting coach and recruiting coordinator at the time, picked up on it.

Ramsey knew he had to see Lackey in person after Lackey, a late-blooming catcher, threw out North Atlanta’s Isaiah Drake, a previous Tech commit with elite speed, whom the Braves drafted in the fifth round in 2023. Defense has never been the question for Lackey, but his hitting was a project.

“Honestly, that excited me, because I’m like, ‘Well, what happens when he does grip the bat the right way?’” Ramsey said.

What happens is this: Lackey, now a junior for the No. 3 Yellow Jackets, has morphed from an overlooked recruit into the top catching prospect in the 2026 MLB Draft class. He leads the team in batting average (.425), slugging percentage (.851), RBIs (33), walks (21) and stolen bases (7-for-7), He’s tied for the team lead with nine home runs through Tech’s first 24 games, which already eclipses his six home runs as a sophomore and four as a freshman.

This year, he’s effectively shedding the “350 Vahn” nickname that teammate and fellow top draft prospect Drew Burress jokingly gave him freshman year, with Lackey’s tendency to hit balls only the distance to the warning track — a moniker to which the good-natured Lackey took no offense.

“It was just basically just working from the ground up,” Lackey said of his hitting game. “I just truly just didn’t have a good swing. … My swing just wasn’t putting myself in a good position to hit all pitches. So I was just kind of actually figuring out how to hit and not, I guess, just ‘See ball, hit ball’ kind of thing. And that was kind of the big thing for me, is developing into an actual hitter.”

Lackey never rushed to be a finished product, Ramsey said, but has continued to develop each year.

In a breakout sophomore season, Lackey tallied a team-high 77 base hits and was third among Division I catchers in batting average (.347), and first among that group with 18 stolen bases on 21 attempts. With Lackey as backstop, Tech’s pitching staff lowered the team’s ERA by 1.57 runs, good for the largest decrease by a Power 4 team that made a regional last year.

Entering this season, Lackey was named first-team All-America by Perfect Game and Baseball America, and he was named to USA Baseball’s Golden Spikes Award preseason watchlist. In the summer, he was selected to the USA Baseball collegiate national team.

Lackey was determined to take a leap this past winter, still not fully satisfied with his swing.

“I was like, OK, I just want to put it all on the table just so I know during this year, like, I don’t want to be thinking (about) the what-ifs,” Lackey said. “What if I did this, what if I worked a little bit harder? I was like, I’m just going to make it no doubt. Basically just play freely, because I did all the work I could.”

He dove into Maven Baseball Lab and used Blast Motion Sensor, technology attached to bats to help analyze a player’s swing. He worked to understand attack angle, or the vertical angle the bat is traveling at as it hits the baseball.

“Things started to click — finally — and then I remember just seeing the ball fly off my bat,” Lackey said. “I always had balls fly off my bat, but… I couldn’t get it in the air. Like, even if I try, like, a million times, I couldn’t. And then I finally started seeing it fly up in the air with good flight, with good power. And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s totally different.’”

This season, it’s all coming together for Lackey as he leads a Georgia Tech offense with a +169 scoring margin, the highest through 24 games in program history.

“Vahn is, at any time, as fast as anyone else on the field,” Ramsey said. “He has as good of hands, he had as good of hitting, and he has the power. I mean, there’s no mystery of why he has all this helium in the draft … You’re looking at a really good athlete that can play anywhere on the field, that can hit for power to all fields … It’s an analytical model team’s dream.”

The “anywhere on the field” bit is not an exaggeration — Lackey became the first player in program history to play all eight defensive positions (excluding pitcher) in Tech’s 14-0 win vs. West Georgia on March 10, finishing a single shy of the cycle.

He was named ACC player of the Week for March 16 and Perfect Game national player of the week after slashing .600/.667/1.467 in four games, also helping the Jackets take two of three games vs. Virginia Tech to open conference play.

“It felt like I was playing a Wiffle ball game,” Lackey said.

As fun as the experience was, it wasn’t intended as an experiment, Ramsey said, but rather a legitimate showcase for Lackey’s skills.

During his Tech career, Lackey’s mental game has come a long way, too, learning how to bounce back from failure playing a rigorous schedule in the Northwoods League (a collegiate summer baseball league) after his freshman year.

“Just learn how to flush a lot of things, like knowing the importance of gratitude and taking the positives out of everything,” Lackey said. “That’s a big part of baseball, because you’re gonna fail, I guess, 70% of the time. So learning that was big for me, and like understanding a lot of confidence, I guess, also can come from, like, succeeding in some ways, but getting that confidence and knowing that, I am a good baseball player, and I do deserve to be here, and that kind of helped me in the long run.”

More evidence of Lackey’s growth?

This year, Lackey finally hit a home run off roommate and pitcher Mason Patel.

No hard feelings from Patel, who has loved watching Lackey put it all together on offense this season.