There’s no place like home—especially when it has a basketball goal in the backyard. For Emercyn Baldridge, that’s where it all began. “My parents and I would always play on our backyard goal and in the fourth grade is when I actually started playing,” said the Warner High School sophomore. “I enjoy spending time with family and hanging out with my little cousins, my friends, and church.”
Sometimes passion takes time to develop, and for Emercyn, it didn’t hit her all at once. “At first I wasn’t inspired by anything, but the more my parents pushed me, the more I fell in love with it and wanted to improve.”
This past season came with its share of growing pains. “At the beginning of the season, we had our challenges due to losing key players and being a young team,” she said. “We were still trying to find our spots and chemistry, but towards the end of the season we gained confidence in ourselves and really started playing well as a team.”
Emercyn is putting in the work both in and out of practice to figure out her role and grow her skillset. “I am still learning where my role is and what roles I need to take on, but I feel like I was probably more effective with my shooting and helping with the ball handling,” she said. “We normally shoot around 500 shots and focus on different scenarios.”
While she’s looking forward to the future, Emercyn knows what she wants. “To make it to State and that we continue to grow as a team,” she said.
She sticks to a solid routine: “Weightlifting for an hour five days a week, after school practice normally lasts around two hours, then I come home, usually get a small snack and my dad and I go to the gym and do some shooting.”
And when things get tough, she leans on those around her. “Honestly, my coach continued to encourage me to keep shooting, even when I didn’t want to and I wasn’t hitting anything,” Emercyn said. “She continued to encourage me.”
