Athlete of the Week: Frankie Gregoire

Shoulders back, chest up, crimson helmet resting on his head, baseball post-graduate Frankie Gregoire steps up to the plate. He eyes the pitcher. He’s calm and collected, for over the past months, he has devoted hundreds of hours to his craft. He has fought through injury, the cold Exeter weather and grueling practices in addition to managing his studies. The pitcher winds back and fires a fastball. Gregoire’s bat whooshes through the humid air. A thwack resounds through the field, the ball flies into the outfield and Gregoire is off, sprinting to first.

Off the field, Gregoire always has a smile on his face “despite his seriousness,” Dutch House dorm head Laura Marshall said. In Dutch House, a small dorm with only eight upperclassmen, “each boy brings his own personality and qualities,” Marshall said. “Frankie has much fun with his dormmates and this spring has become one of the two chefs of the house.” Dormmate and upper Luca Amorosa described Gregoire as someone “always in a good mood and always making the boys laugh.”

Perhaps Gregoire’s most striking quality is his impressive work ethic. “He would go on morning workouts during winter term, trudging through the snow all the way from Dutch House, before classes,” senior Moises Escobar said.

“Frankie has much fun with his dormmates and this spring has become one of the two chefs of the house.”

“In the off-season, I [forced myself to get] up at 5 a.m. to go workout,” Gregoire said. “The winter before the season is the most important: that’s the time when I have to do most of my training.”

“His hard work and determination translate directly into his play,” Amorosa said. He puts in work every day in practice, frequently staying afterwards to perfect his swing or get in another workout. “He’s always looking to better himself, and because of his attitude, he makes his teammates around him better,” Amorosa said.

Even when injured, Frankie gives baseball his all. “I broke my right wrist the summer before my sophomore year and played my entire sophomore year with it broken. I didn’t know it was broken, it just kind of hurt, and I’d just play with it and take a lot of Ibuprofen and think it would go away, but it never did,” Gregoire said. Playing with a broken wrist for 10 months was serious enough to warrant surgery.

Despite this setback, Gregoire “never became discouraged despite the difficulty of being one-handed for a long time,” Marshall said. After intense rehab, his wrist finally healed, and Frankie dove right back into his training.

The mental adversity he faced coping with his injuries made the pressures of a sport like baseball easier for him. “I don’t think I would be where I am now if I didn’t have to deal with those injuries,” Gregoire explained.

Motivation for Gregoire comes from the knowledge that failure is an integral element of sports. In baseball, “there’s no plateau where you say, ‘OK I have to get to this point.’ You can always get better, no matter how good you are, there’s always room to improve because you’re going to fail at some point,” Gregoire said.

But his hard work isn’t unnoticed—his teammates voted Gregoire to be team captain. He proved his leadership and passion after only a week into the season, when the vote was held. “It’s pretty rare that a post-graduate is voted a captain—it’s usually a three or four year guy so obviously the other kids respect him and know that he loves baseball,” coach Dana Barbin said.

Gregoire starts at center fielder; Barbin calls him a “power hitter.” Under Gregoire’s leadership, the team has had a strong season so far. “We’ve had some good wins in the past couple weeks,” Gregoire said. This preliminary success is impressive due to the fact that they were forced to hold preseason practices indoors due to the weather. “We are where we should be, and we’re going to keep it rolling,” Gregoire said.

Gregoire has been an athlete for many years—most notably baseball and basketball. He played for Team Connecticut Baseball when he was younger and then switched over to the Connecticut Capitals, a travelling baseball team.

He dropped basketball after freshman year to focus on baseball because he liked to train for it, and for him it was more natural than basketball.

Following in his father’s footsteps, a football post-graduate, Gregoire chose Exeter because he needed another year after his injuries set him back in the recruiting process. To him, Exeter was “the best school that was around. It was a pretty obvious choice.”

“Frank is always committed to better himself as an athlete, student and person,” Amorosa said. For Gregoire, athletics and academics come before anything else.

“I make sure I can get the schoolwork done and then put all the remainder of my time that I’m not doing work related to school back into my sport whether it’s physically with training or mentally working on it or watching film,” he said.

When you’re focusing nearly all your time into one activity, it’s easy to feel burnt out and lose genuine interest. To “remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing,” Gregoire says you need to keep yourself motivated.

He does this by setting his alarm to a motivational speech: Eric Thomas’ “How bad do you want it.” Awaking to the words, “when you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, that’s when you will be successful,” Gregoire carries this mentality in every facet of his daily life.