A three-part series exploring youth sports, identity, injury, and resilience through the eyes of one family — Jeff, Lisa, and Will Proctor.
You Are More Than Your Sport
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Episode Summary
The Proctor Family Series concludes with the voice that matters most: the athlete himself. Will Proctor — multi-sport kid from Manhattan Beach, top-100 national prospect, true freshman starter at the University of Georgia, Cape Cod League champion, Saturday starter for the Bulldogs, and now filmmaker — sits down with Todd Merkow to close the arc that Jeff and Lisa opened. This is the athlete's perspective on everything his parents described, and it's more honest, more self-aware, and more useful for parents than almost anything else in the series.
Will grew up with sports as the entire frame of his world. His dad worked in the sports industry. Every memory, every friendship, every decision in his life ran through baseball. He describes wanting to be a professional in every sport he touched — if it was flag football season, he was going to be the Raiders' starting quarterback; if it was basketball season, he was going to play for Coach K at Duke. But baseball took hold early and never let go. He was obsessed from the moment he picked up a ball, and he treated himself like a professional from the time he was ten years old. He had a vision board at thirteen with every stat and milestone he planned to hit on the way to the Hall of Fame. He turned down Stanford because the math requirements got in the way of his baseball development plan. He got his first D1 offer after eighth grade and committed to Georgia his sophomore year of high school. The dream was not a fantasy — it was a plan, and for a long time, it was working.
I put every single ounce of my self-worth into my baseball. When I wasn't having success, I was just a 17-year-old kid dealing with real adversity for the first time. I wish I was a little easier on myself.
The pressure, Will is emphatic about this, was entirely self-imposed. His parents never put their self-worth into his baseball career. After a strikeout, after an error, after a brutal week, they were there with dinner and a learning opportunity and nothing more. He credits them completely. But the internal pressure was unlike anything most athletes experience. He describes having anxiety that ran through his entire career — not just performance nerves, but something more physical and more consuming. He was on the toilet all day before games. He was praying the ball wouldn't be hit to him while simultaneously believing he was going to be the greatest baseball player who ever lived. That juxtaposition — supreme confidence and paralyzing fear living in the same body — is one of the most honest descriptions of elite athlete anxiety you'll hear anywhere.
I had the supreme confidence that I was going to be the best baseball player who ever played the sport. And yet, in the little moments, it was: I'm screwed if this ball comes my way.
Senior year of high school is where it broke open. After a dominant showing at Area Code Games — the MLB-sponsored showcase where the best high school players in the country perform for every scout in the sport simultaneously — Will came back to his high school season with thirty scouts in the stands for his first game. By week two, fifteen. By week four, five. By the end of the season, a couple of guys checking in to see if he was still struggling. He was hitting until his hands bled every night, convinced this was a physical problem he could fix with more work. It wasn't. He was a seventeen-year-old kid dealing with real adversity for the first time, and he had no tools for it. He went to Georgia anyway, started at second base as a true freshman in the SEC, hit .241 with home runs, and was miserable. He thought he was a failure. He was watching his friends in rookie ball and couldn't understand why he was in a geology class learning about rocks.
The pivot to pitching is one of the most remarkable moments in the series. Will didn't quit. He diagnosed his own problem — too much time to think in the field, too much space for the anxiety to run — and engineered a solution. He bet his college roommate he could throw harder than him, threw 93 in front of the pitching coach on an off day, and decided he was a pitcher. He went to summer ball and told the coaches the same thing. He learned a curveball from a Sports Illustrated article his dad sent him. He led the team in ERA his first year pitching, had a great Cape Cod League showing, and came back to Georgia as the Saturday starter on a staff that included the fourth overall pick in the MLB draft. He was, by every measure, back on track. Then his shoulder fell apart.
They don't make E:60s about easy stories. So this is going to be the sickest E:60 one day.
The injury section is the most detailed account of what happened from Will's perspective. The cortisone shot. The Vanderbilt game. The shoulder dislocating in the dugout. The surgery — he was the third person ever to have it, the same procedure Julio Urías had gotten before becoming a Dodger. The surgeon telling his parents he'd never pitch again, a conversation they kept from Will for years. The draft that never came. Covid wiping out the rehabilitation infrastructure he'd built at Georgia. His then-girlfriend Lauren becoming his physical therapist, throwing partner, and emotional anchor while he threw into a mattress in his bedroom in tears. The transfer to Michigan, where he arrived throwing 60 miles an hour and spent a season pitching through pain he describes as tears rolling down his face. The moment in the eighth inning of game five of a weekend series when he was the last man in the bullpen, came out and struck out the side touching 90, and then couldn't move his arm for a month. The draft that shrank to five rounds during covid. The scouts who told him they couldn't take a pick on a 22-year-old who couldn't lift his arm. The year of eligibility Michigan offered him back, which he turned down because he couldn't face the pain again.
If you choose to, this will be the best thing that ever happened to you. That injury was the best thing to ever happen to me.
What Will does with all of this is what makes the episode worth listening to. He didn't suppress it — he made a movie about it. The film is called "I F***ing Hate Baseball," and the title is the point: he hated what baseball had become for him, but the ending is that if he didn't hate baseball, he wouldn't be the person he is today. The process of making the film — of going through the artistic exercise of unpacking feelings he'd pushed down for years — was more therapeutic than anything else he tried. He found filmmaking during the eight months he wasn't allowed to touch a baseball after surgery. He's now working on a documentary called American Daredevil. He's recently engaged to Lauren, who he met at Georgia. He has a master's degree from Michigan. He can go watch his friends make their MLB debuts and feel nothing but happy for them.
You're going to get to the end of your athletic journey and go, 'Man, I wish I just enjoyed it' — whether you got there or not.
His advice to parents is simple and comes from a place of genuine reflection: be like his parents. Be there. Offer life advice, not baseball advice. And understand that even for a kid who wanted it as badly as Will did — who hit until his hands bled, who turned down Stanford, who had the same agent as Albert Pujols at seventeen — the journey is the thing. Not the destination. The journey is way better, and you're going to get to the end of your athletic career and wish you'd just enjoyed it. Whether you got there or not.
Top 5 Takeaways
Self-imposed pressure is still pressure — and it can be just as damaging as external pressure. Will is emphatic that his parents never added to his burden. But the internal pressure he carried from age ten was real, relentless, and ultimately contributed to the anxiety that derailed his high school season and followed him through his entire career. Parents who raise kids in a culture of high achievement and unconditional support are doing the right thing — but they should also know that some kids will internalize the dream so completely that the pressure becomes its own problem. Checking in on how your kid is actually feeling, not just how they're performing, matters even when the external environment looks healthy.
The anxiety Will describes is more common than athletes let on. He was diagnosed with anxiety in college, put on medication, and eventually found his way to a therapist. But he also describes friends who are now in the MLB who had panic attacks in college, ended up in the hospital, and got through it with the help of coaches who recognized what was happening. The culture of elite athletics makes it almost impossible for young men especially to say 'I'm struggling.' Parents who normalize the conversation — who ask directly, who don't treat anxiety as weakness or a sign that their kid can't handle the pressure — give their athletes something most coaches won't.
The pivot to pitching is a masterclass in athlete self-knowledge. Will didn't quit when he was miserable at second base. He diagnosed his own problem — too much time to think, too much space for the anxiety to spiral — and found a solution. That kind of self-awareness is rare in a nineteen-year-old, and it's worth naming for parents: the goal isn't to protect your kid from adversity. It's to raise a kid who can look at adversity and figure out what to do next. Will's parents didn't solve his problem. They were there while he solved it himself.
The cortisone shot is a decision the whole family carries. Will mentions it matter-of-factly — the shot that masked his pain so he could keep throwing, that may have contributed to the severity of what followed. He's not looking for blame. But the lesson is real: when your kid is in pain, slow down. Get a second opinion. Don't let the urgency of a draft year, a scout in the stands, or your kid's own desire to compete override the urgency of a body sending signals. The season will end. The career might not have to.
The documentary was therapy. Will found filmmaking during the eight months he wasn't allowed to touch a baseball after surgery. He made a film called 'I F***ing Hate Baseball' as a way of unpacking feelings he'd pushed down for years. The artistic process of going through those feelings — of making something out of a bad situation — was more healing than anything else he tried. Parents don't need to hand their kids a camera. But they can encourage their kids to find something outside the sport, something that has nothing to do with performance or outcomes, that gives them a place to put everything the sport stirs up.
You are more than your sport. Will says this twice in rapid fire — once to an athlete who's doing great but struggling, once to a parent whose kid is still performing but hurting. It's the through line of the entire series. Jeff said it. Lisa said it. Will lived it. The identity will come back. It always comes back. What sports builds — the work ethic, the resilience, the ability to pursue something with everything you have — doesn't disappear when the sport ends. It finds a new home. Will's new home is filmmaking, and he says without hesitation that the injury was the best thing that ever happened to him. Parents who can hold that possibility for their kids, even in the darkest moments of the journey, give them something that outlasts the sport.
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