Todd Merkow sits down with Jeff Proctor — longtime friend, Valiant Sports Society board member, director, producer, game show creator, and now documentary filmmaker — for a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to be a sports parent when you've lived the athlete's life yourself.

Jeff grew up in Carmel, Indiana, the child of divorced parents, playing everything — church baseball, hockey, tackle football as a second grader, soccer, basketball, tennis, golf. His Swedish mother worked two jobs and didn't always understand American sports, but she loved the idea of exposing her boys to all of it. His father was a state track champion in Missouri who ran at Georgetown, where he set a national record in the four-by-400 — but he was largely absent from Jeff's athletic life, critical more than supportive, and rarely at games. Jeff moved to California, narrowed to baseball, basketball, and football, spent two years at the American School in Japan, came back for his senior year at what was then Harvard School (now Harvard Westlake — the same program that would later produce Max Fried, Lucas Giolito, and Jack Flaherty), and then played four years of baseball at Georgetown. He was six-five, naturally athletic, and largely self-made as a player. Nobody was hiring a hitting coach for him at age nine.

That background shapes everything about how Jeff approached parenting. He and his wife Lisa — a former high school tennis player in Texas who has since run 30 marathons and runs six miles every morning — have two kids: Hannah, now 30, and Will, now 27. Hannah is three years older. She played soccer as a young kid, with Jeff coaching her, and she and her coach quickly discovered that their daughters listened better to each other's fathers than to their own. Hannah never scored a goal. She didn't care. She was in it for the friends, the social experience, the fun. She played tennis in high school because Lisa was a serious tennis player, but she didn't have the killer instinct Lisa had — a fact that burned Lisa for years. The defining Hannah tennis moment: she lost to a ninth grader as a senior, skipped off the court, and said, "Well, that was fun. Where are we going?" Lisa's response, eventually, was to let go. Hannah went on to get her master's in women, peace and security, and now works in DC. She still talks about the foul ball she hit off the best pitcher in Manhattan Beach.

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Don't have a backup plan. But have them be interested in other things.

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Will was different from the start. He wanted to win. He was usually the leading goal scorer in his soccer league, the leading scorer in his basketball league, and a standout in baseball from a young age. He played basketball his freshman year of high school, then committed exclusively to baseball. He joined the Garciaparra Baseball Group — Nomar's brother Michael runs it — in its second year of existence, and from that point on, the family's weekends were consumed by travel tournaments in Arizona, Florida, and across California. The team was unusually close. No jealousy among families or players. They loved each other. And Will kept getting better.

By the time Will was 14, college coaches were visiting the house. By 16, Major League scouts were coming for workouts and couch conversations. Perfect Game Baseball rated him the number two shortstop in California and top 100 in the country. He was recruited by Harvard Westlake — Lucas Giolito, who was throwing 100 miles an hour in high school, gave him the campus tour — but the commute was too long. He chose Loyola, transferred back to MiraCosta after a year and a half, and spent the rest of his high school career with his friends. He ran his own recruitment process, making calls to coaches and scouts himself. Jeff describes watching his son mature rapidly through that process — becoming someone who could hold a room of adults as a peer, not just a prospect.

Will committed to the University of Georgia, where he played second base as a true freshman in the SEC, hit around .240 with a handful of home runs, and had what Jeff describes as a relatively successful freshman year by any reasonable standard. But Will was dealing with something nobody fully knew about at the time: anxiety in the field. He didn't want ground balls hit to him. He was convinced he couldn't hit a slider. The culture of SEC baseball — testosterone, toughness, no asking for help — meant he largely worked through it alone. His safety net turned out to be the mound. A bullpen session where he threw harder than his roommate, a pitching coach who noticed, and a summer in the California Collegiate League with the Orange County Riptide later, Will came back to Georgia as a pitcher.

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He had a lot of anxieties that we really didn't know about, because he did put a lot of pressure on himself. In retrospect, that's probably one of the things that could be more helpful coming from a parent — just asking your kid if they need some help.

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The transformation was remarkable. He became the Saturday starter on a Georgia staff that included a first-round pick and a second-round pick. He had a three-pitch arsenal — a fastball that touched 95, a curveball that scouts called one of the best in the country, a killer changeup — and he could throw any of them for a strike at any time. He went to Cape Cod, went five and one for the Wareham Gatekeepers, and came back to Georgia for his junior year as one of the most highly regarded pitching prospects in the country. Three starts in, he felt something in his shoulder. A slight rotator cuff tear. They shut him down. He got a shot. He went to the bullpen to test it, threw a pitch, and it went about six feet.

Jeff and Lisa were in the stands at Vanderbilt — Georgia was number two in the country, Vanderbilt number three — watching a game Will wasn't pitching in. A Georgia player hit a grand slam. Will threw his arms up in the dugout. His shoulder fell out of its socket. A trainer came to find the Proctors in the stands. It took five or six attempts to get the shoulder back in. The football doctors who examined him said: your son is not going to pitch again. I hope he has another position.

He had torn his anterior capsule, his rotator cuff, and his labrum — all three. His agent connected them with Neil Elattrache, arguably the best shoulder surgeon in the country, who had developed his own procedure for exactly this injury with a near-perfect success rate. Will had the surgery. He graduated from Georgia without pitching again. He went into the portal, transferred to Michigan, pitched for a year, never got above 90, was always in pain. He had one more year of eligibility because of COVID. He had already gotten his master's at Michigan. He was 22 or 23, playing with 18-year-olds, and it wasn't getting better. He ended his baseball career.

The mental health section of this conversation is the most honest Jeff has been publicly about what he missed. Lisa was there for Will — long walks, real conversations, making sure he talked about what he needed to talk about. Jeff operated under the assumption that Will would be fine, that he'd get over it, that it was just a bump in the road. He still asks Will to go to baseball games sometimes. Will usually says no. Jeff understands now why. Twenty of Will's friends are playing in the major leagues right now — Cape Cod teammates, travel ball teammates, area code games teammates. Will is probably the only player on that area code games roster who wasn't drafted. He still has a hard time watching.

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I always figured the injury was just a bump in the road. He's going to get better. He's going to get his opportunity. He worked so hard, he deserves that opportunity. I think I lived in a little bit of a dream world.

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But Will found something else. He's a filmmaker now. He's directing a documentary that Jeff is producing. They work together. Jeff is trying to learn Will's new passion the way Will once shared his. The conversation ends with Jeff reflecting on what he wishes he'd understood earlier: that the injuries that feel catastrophic in the moment are rarely as catastrophic as they seem, that the mental side of the sport deserves as much attention as the physical, and that the job of a sports parent is not to manage the outcome but to be present for the journey — because it goes by faster than you can imagine, and the kid who wanted to go to baseball games with you will one day be 27, and you'll be 59, and the games will be over, but the relationship will still be there if you did it right.