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 .
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 .
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 .
One of the biggest challenges I think that I faced . Kind of pre-college and going through the recruiting process and even kind of before I got here was just again kind of self-doubt and kind of comparing myself to others , especially the nature of my sport and I think sports in general is it's kind of always a comparison game of who's doing better , who's doing worse , all of that , and so that's something that I really had to focus on . And just focusing on my process and how much better am I getting every day , not necessarily , oh well , this person's better than me or this person's worse than me , because at the end of the day it's my journey and my process and how I became a collegiate athlete .
That's been my dream for a really long time , but I know that that's not . 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 .
