In school athletics, consideration gravitates towards the seen: the pinnacle coach pacing the sideline, the star participant underneath stadium lights, the outcomes posted on scoreboards and social feeds. What not often makes headlines is the work taking place quietly within the background—the conversations with out cameras, the mentorship with out metrics, the management that doesn’t announce itself till years later. But it’s typically this unseen work that determines whether or not a program merely wins or actually endures.
Robby Emery has spent a lot of his life working in that area. A pastor, public speaker, and Michigan Soccer’s Director of Character Improvement, Emery doesn’t measure success in championships alone, nor does he consider affect requires visibility. Actually, his philosophy runs counter to the trendy economic system of consideration. “As quickly as you select to be a fan, you possibly can’t be a good friend,” he says. “However if you happen to select to be a good friend, you even have the affect you’re imagined to have.”
At a time when collegiate athletics is navigating unprecedented complexity—NIL cash, social media stress, fixed scrutiny—Emery’s work has develop into extra important, not much less. His position isn’t about managing notion. It’s about shaping folks. And as Michigan Soccer has confronted moments of each triumph and turbulence, Emery’s regular presence provides a reminder that character, not like popularity, is constructed slowly—and examined when nobody is watching.
A Calling Rooted in Folks
Emery didn’t got down to work in high-performance environments. Actually, he’s fast to make clear that elite platforms had been by no means the draw. “I wasn’t drawn by excessive efficiency,” he says. “I used to be drawn by folks.”
That intuition traces again to his teenage years. At 14 or 15, lengthy earlier than social media turned affect right into a commodity, Emery prayed a easy prayer: to develop into an individual of affect to folks of affect. The thought wasn’t proximity to energy for its personal sake, however multiplication—influence that traveled additional by touring by way of others.
“If I can affect the one who influences 1,000,000,” he explains, “then I don’t must be that one.”
Over time, Emery observed a sample. Folks in high-profile positions typically had loads of followers, however few true buddies. Admiration created distance; relationship closed it. “As quickly as you’re taking a selfie
with somebody, you possibly can’t function as a good friend anymore,” he says. Friendship, he believes, requires privateness, belief, and the willingness to be current with out agenda.
That posture—good friend earlier than fan—would quietly form all the things that adopted.
From Church Plant to the Coronary heart of the Program
Emery’s path to Michigan Soccer didn’t start with a job provide or a strategic profession transfer. It started with a church plant.
In 2016, Emery and his household moved again to Michigan from Houston to start out a church. Like most church vegetation, it concerned evangelizing, listening, and constructing relationships with individuals who wanted help. A type of folks was a younger man who had just lately moved from Houston to play soccer at Michigan.
The connection wasn’t about star energy. The athlete wasn’t a family identify. He was third on the depth chart. However he wanted steering, neighborhood, and somebody keen to spend money on him with out expectation. Emery grew to become that particular person—inviting him into his dwelling, sharing meals, finding out scripture collectively.
“Pupil-athletes can’t go to church on Sunday,” Emery says. “So we simply introduced church to them.”
That one relationship led to others. Slowly, organically, Emery grew to become a mentor not simply to at least one athlete, however to a number of. And ultimately, these relationships opened the door for him to serve this system extra formally.
What’s hanging concerning the story is what isn’t there: ambition. Emery wasn’t making an attempt to leverage connections or climb an institutional ladder. He was merely doing what he had all the time executed—exhibiting up for the following particular person in want. The size got here later.
Tradition Below Strain: Belief, Accountability, and Management in Adversity
Faculty soccer not often permits a program to battle in non-public. When scrutiny intensifies, the noise will get louder, and each choice feels amplified—contained in the constructing and out. Michigan has felt that stress in latest seasons, the sort that forces a corporation to confront what it values when the highlight is harshest. For Emery, these moments aren’t detours from the work; they’re the work.
“The inspiration of all the things is belief,” he says. “It’s not a communication downside—it’s a belief downside.” In moments of scrutiny, Emery argues that leaders should first ask why they arrived there within the first place. What doorways had been left open? What expectations went uninspected? Accountability, he notes, is in style in concept however uncomfortable in follow—particularly when it turns inward.
His framework for wholesome tradition is deceptively easy: belief, wholesome battle, dedication, accountability, and outcomes. Miss the order, and the construction collapses.
“Battle isn’t unhealthy,” Emery says. “Unresolved battle is unhealthy. Wholesome battle results in dedication. Dedication results in accountability. Accountability produces outcomes.”
Underlying all of it’s a sober view of human nature. Emery doesn’t consider tradition has a ceiling as a result of folks don’t. Everyone seems to be flawed. Everybody carries selfishness. Maturity, he says, typically comes not by way of intention, however by way of accountability—marriage, household, management, consequence.
“You don’t know the way egocentric you’re till life places weight on you,” he says.
In high-stakes environments, the place stress magnifies habits, Emery’s work facilities on closing the hole between values spoken and values lived. Not with condemnation, however with readability.
Id Past the Jersey
For at this time’s school athletes, id is underneath fixed assault—not solely from efficiency expectations, however from the limitless suggestions loop of social media, NIL alternatives, and public opinion. Emery believes considered one of his most essential obligations helps younger males separate who they’re from what they do.
He typically illustrates this with a ladder.
“I need them to climb,” he says. “I need them to succeed. I need them to get all the things they’ll from their expertise.” However he’s equally insistent that they climb down simply as rapidly. Reward, he explains, is intoxicating—and harmful if internalized too deeply.
“In case you keep on the high, you’re going to fall,” he tells them. “And falling from that top hurts.”
To drive the purpose dwelling, Emery makes use of one other metaphor: juggling glass and rubber balls. Some issues—household, religion, integrity—are glass. Drop them, and so they shatter. Others—jobs, roles, seasons—are rubber. They bounce again.
“You need to drop the rubber one,” he says.
Development, Emery reminds them, doesn’t occur on mountaintops. Nothing grows there. Development occurs in valleys, in humility, within the unglamorous work of changing into grounded. In an surroundings that rewards elevation, Emery teaches descent.
Being Prepared When You’re Chosen
The themes Emery teaches every day—preparation, humility, readiness—are on the coronary heart of his guide, Decide Me
Halfway by way of the present, the band invited somebody from the viewers to play guitar. A younger man fought his solution to the stage, pulled a guitar choose from his pocket, and performed flawlessly in entrance of 40,000 folks. What struck Emery wasn’t the efficiency—it was the preparation.
“That child didn’t know he’d be chosen,” Emery says. “However he was prepared simply in case.”
The message resonated deeply with the athletes Emery mentors. Alternatives don’t announce themselves prematurely. You don’t prepare within the second—you put together lengthy earlier than it arrives.
That very same philosophy shapes Emery’s imaginative and prescient for occasions just like the Olympia Efficiency Weekend and for the way forward for character improvement in collegiate athletics. With extra money, extra freedom, and extra publicity than ever, athletes want disciplines that anchor them when life squeezes.
“What comes out if you’re bumped,” Emery says, “is what’s already in you.”
Legacy, for Emery, isn’t one thing you declare. It’s one thing folks observe. It’s being the identical particular person on good days and unhealthy ones. It’s tipping properly even after unhealthy service. It’s giving your loved ones the most effective of you, not the leftovers.
“I don’t need to have to talk to say one thing,” he says. “I need folks to see it.”
In a results-driven trade, which may be probably the most countercultural stance of all. And maybe probably the most enduring.