A Major League champion helps Nashville youth athletes find confidence

This article was originally published by the Students United News Network (SUNN) in the first citywide student-led newspaper in the USA, Nashville SUNN ( NashvilleSUNN. com ). On Wednesday, Nov.

2, 2016, Ben Zobrist played one of the biggest games of his baseball career. The previous year, he’d won the World Series with the Kansas City Royals, and now he had a chance to win it again as a veteran leader of the Chicago Cubs. It had been 108 years since the Cubs had won a World Series, and they now had a chance to break the curse.

With the game in a 10th-inning deadlock, Ben hit the go-ahead run, winning it for the Cubs 8-7 and earning himself the World Series MVP award. Nashville SUNN Opinion: Boring Company’s Nashville tunnel plan raises red flags As a professional baseball player, Zobrist learned that winning required even more mental strength than physical endurance. Like all high-level athletes, he faced a ton of pressure and had to deal with the anxiety that comes with performing in the big leagues.

So when he retired from the Cubs in 2019 at 38 and settled with his family in Franklin, Ben decided to focus his time and energy on strengthening the mind behind the player – especially in young athletes. He founded a nonprofit, Champion Forward , that helps teen players, their parents and coaches learn to manage mental health struggles, giving them support and skills to talk about emotional stress and to navigate their victories and failures with confidence and integrity. I was 5 years old when Ben Zobrist hit that winning run for the Cubs in the 2016 World Series.