Max Riemer, a graduate of the McCallie School, played Division I baseball at the University of North Carolina.
The former Tar Heel, now 26 years old, lives in Chattanooga and works for a start-up tech company. He and his wife, Kate, met when they were both in high school here, but they didn’t start dating until college.
A few days after Christmas in 2025, Riemer received an unexpected package delivery. Inside the carefully wrapped package was a lightly used baseball.
Riemer had seen this particular baseball once before — but only for a split second. It takes about 4 tenths of a second for a college baseball pitch to travel from the pitcher’s hand to the batter’s box. That’s how long Riemer had to track the ball and swing his bat. The resulting high fly ball easily cleared the outfield fence in right-center field at the University of Notre Dame baseball park in South Bend, Indiana.
“It is the farthest ball I ever hit,” Riemer said in an interview. “(A ball-tracking device) said it went 466 feet. You hit a ball like that, and you don’t even feel it come off the bat. It hit the perfect spot in the barrel.”