Twenty years in the game, four of them in college.
I grew up in Waxhaw and pitched at Cuthbertson. From there I went to Gaston College, and from Gaston to NC State.
My sophomore year at Gaston was the best baseball I've played. I finished with a 1.88 ERA, 56 strikeouts across 48 innings and a 7–1 record, and I was named Region 10 Relief Pitcher of the Year and All-Region First Team. We were the number one ranked junior college team in the country that season. In the region postseason I threw seven innings of one-run ball with six strikeouts. My fastball sat 91–93 and topped 95, with a slider and a changeup in the low 80s.
At NC State I pitched in the ACC — the best conference in college baseball — and finished a degree in Sport Management. I also spent a lot of that time around the technology side of the sport: TrackMan, force plates and motion capture, learning to read what the data actually says about a delivery rather than just collecting it.
What I learned the hard way
Somewhere in there I also had Tommy John surgery. I'd been pitching through elbow pain because that's what I thought was right, and I found out the hard way that it wasn't. I'd been building my throwing volume up wrong for years, too. Nobody sat me down at fifteen and explained workload, or the difference between soreness and pain, or why how you build up matters more than any bullpen you'll ever throw.
The rehab put me alongside physical therapists, doctors and strength coaches for the better part of a year. I learned more about how an arm actually works in that stretch than in the six years before it, and I came back throwing 95.
Why I'm doing this
The part I enjoyed most in college wasn't my own outings. It was sitting with teammates, working out what was actually holding one of them back, and building him something specific to fix it. I'd try everything on myself first — training methods, drills, arm care routines — and then figure out what carried over to somebody built differently.
That's the whole job as I see it. Not handing a kid the program that worked for me, but working out what this particular kid needs and writing that down.
I am not trying to sell anyone ten quick miles an hour. I build velocity the right way — on top of an arm that holds up, and habits that keep it there.