Rob Emery

I think the main thing I wish I knew then was that you only need to worry about playing well where you’re at (and having excellent grades) and everything else will take care of itself. Looking back to high school and the start of the recruiting process I just remember being so wrapped up in needing success, stats, college offers in the immediate term that I lost the focus on just succeeding game by game, pitch by pitch. If you look back at my high school stats I think I hit under .200 my sophomore and junior seasons because I was just so wrapped up in all the noise that didn’t matter I never got to be the player I was meant to be at that time. Finally after my sophomore and junior years, I just said whatever’s gonna happen will happen and had an incredible summer prior to my senior season. It was like the pressure came off me because the schools I wanted to go to so badly had recruited other guys and I just went out and played.

I was hoping to go to a great academic, athletic and warm climate school. I ended up committing to Dartmouth College after my senior summer, I got two of the three criteria. I had multiple offers, but they were all around 25% and I felt like the schools weren’t particularly interested or invested in me. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in them. Dartmouth had really recruited me hard and let me know they saw the type of player I could be and that was what made me feel comfortable taking that leap to go there. 

I would say they’re actually very similar from a purely baseball standpoint. What you don’t have to deal with in professional baseball is all the study hall, classes, off the field stuff that can be really distracting at times. I can’t imagine myself not playing college baseball because of how much I learned from the discipline that handling all the off field stuff gave me. It really makes me appreciate the gift I have now to just get to play everyday and the skills you learn from juggling all those plates in college stay with you. 

Control what you can control. Put all your effort into becoming the best version of yourself you can everyday. That means you need to dominate everything within your control. Diet, hydration, sleep, schoolwork all has to be automatic so you can focus when it comes time for lift and practice. Train your body holistically to become the best MOVER you can become, not the best weight lifter. Train joints and understand your anatomy instead of training muscles. This will make it much easier when you need to make mechanical adjustments that are baseball specific because you’ll have the mobility you need to perform the movements, instead of having muscle where you don’t need it, impeding your mobility.

Focus on doing the normal boring baseball stuff that good players do all the time- swing at strikes, take balls, focus every pitch, learn from failure and control what you can control. These are the things that play at the professional level and separate you because there’s a million guys here that have incredible tools that can’t do normal baseball stuff at a high level and can’t handle adversity.