In faculty athletics, consideration gravitates towards the seen: the top 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 occurring 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 really 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 imagine affect requires visibility. In actual fact, his philosophy runs counter to the fashionable economic system of consideration. “As quickly as you select to be a fan, you possibly can’t be a pal,” he says. “However when you select to be a pal, you even have the affect you’re purported to have.”
At a time when collegiate athletics is navigating unprecedented complexity—NIL cash, social media stress, fixed scrutiny—Emery’s work has grow to be extra important, not much less. His function 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 affords a reminder that character, not like repute, 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. In actual fact, 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 grow to be an individual of affect to folks of affect. The thought wasn’t proximity to energy for its personal sake, however multiplication—impression that traveled additional by touring via others.
“If I can affect the one who influences one million,” he explains, “then I don’t must be that one.”
Over time, Emery seen a sample. Folks in high-profile positions typically had loads of followers, however few true pals. Admiration created distance; relationship closed it. “As quickly as you’re taking a selfie
with somebody, you possibly can’t function as a pal anymore,” he says. Friendship, he believes, requires privateness, belief, and the willingness to be current with out agenda.
That posture—pal earlier than fan—would quietly form all the pieces 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 assist. A kind 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 title. He was third on the depth chart. However he wanted steering, neighborhood, and somebody prepared to spend money on him with out expectation. Emery grew to become that particular person—inviting him into his residence, sharing meals, learning scripture collectively.
“Scholar-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 finally, these relationships opened the door for him to serve this system extra formally.
What’s putting 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 at all times completed—displaying up for the following particular person in want. The dimensions got here later.
Tradition Beneath Stress: Belief, Accountability, and Management in Adversity
Faculty soccer not often permits a program to battle in personal. When scrutiny intensifies, the noise will get louder, and each resolution feels amplified—contained in the constructing and out. Michigan has felt that stress in latest seasons, the sort that forces a company 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 muse of all the pieces 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 well-liked in concept however uncomfortable in apply—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 imagine 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 via intention, however via 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 conduct, 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 faculty 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 one in every of his most essential duties 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 pieces 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.
“Should you keep on the high, you’re going to fall,” he tells them. “And falling from that top hurts.”
To drive the purpose residence, 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 wish to drop the rubber one,” he says.
Progress, Emery reminds them, doesn’t occur on mountaintops. Nothing grows there. Progress occurs in valleys, in humility, within the unglamorous work of changing into grounded. In an atmosphere that rewards elevation, Emery teaches descent.
Being Prepared When You’re Chosen
The themes Emery teaches each day—preparation, humility, readiness—are on the coronary heart of his ebook, Decide Me
Halfway via the present, the band invited somebody from the viewers to play guitar. A younger man fought his strategy 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 growth in collegiate athletics. With more cash, extra freedom, and extra publicity than ever, athletes want disciplines that anchor them when life squeezes.
“What comes out once 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 effectively even after unhealthy service. It’s giving your loved ones the perfect of you, not the leftovers.
“I don’t wish to have to talk to say one thing,” he says. “I need folks to see it.”
In a results-driven business, that could be essentially the most countercultural stance of all. And maybe essentially the most enduring.