It just matters about how you progress every day as a player . Something that I do to really balance like my academics and my um obviously my softball schedule , my athletics , my weights , all of that is just to really focus on being present on where I am . So if I'm at Lyft in the morning I focus , I'm here for this hour .
Trust that all of that hard work that you put in will pay off at the end . So it can seem hard whenever you're having to miss birthday parties or you're having to miss homecoming or having to miss all this stuff for softball , but if being a collegiate athlete is truly what you want to do , then it's all going to pay off in the end . Hi , my name is Emma King .
Like we have such great athletes . We're competing at the Big 10 level , and I just love the culture that our coaches have created that my team and my teammates have created , and it just had kind of everything that I wanted in being able to play a college sport while also being a student athlete . So my freshman year , one of the biggest things that I learned from playing and just practicing every day and just being at the collegiate level is that it's kind of a cliche and everyone tells you this , but it definitely is a faster game for sure .
I mean . I really just ended up being here from loving the game of softball and working hard at my academics , working hard at my craft , and just to be able to be looked up to by little girls or just little boys or whoever it is , like I think that's such a huge honor and like a role that I don't take lightly . The whole emergence of NIL has just been such an awesome thing for student athletes because we put in so much hard work and time and everything that goes into becoming a student athlete , so I think it's awesome that now we're kind of able to get like the reward of it in a sense , not necessarily more in a money perspective , not just like .
The ultimate reason like why I wanted to become a collegiate athlete , I wanted to do that because I wanted to come make amazing friendships , amazing relationships with my coaches , with my teammates , with our um support staff , and just learn how to become a better human being and be able to take that out into the world . One piece of advice I would give to younger student athletes who are trying to become collegiate athletes is , um , I would just say continue to work hard . Every single day , like , everyone says like the grind is real , like as a cliche , but that really is a real thing and ultimately you are the one who drives like your passion for how much you wanna work and .
