For someone who had the rest of his senior year of high school wiped out by a pandemic, Mountain View’s Quinn Rooks appears to be hitting all the right notes.
“In life, things happen, but we’re human and we just need to move past it,” Rooks said. “And I think the way I’ve been going about that is right. Every day I come up with a plan to where I can get my work in, continue my studies, keep up with everything and just hope for the future, hope for the best.”
Hitting the right notes is sort of Rooks’ thing.
He plays baritone saxophone for Mountain View’s top concert and jazz bands. He’s also the drum major who often conducts the Thunder marching band.
But where Rooks learned most of his life lessons is on the baseball diamond.
“Baseball is huge game of life lessons,” Rooks said. “It’s a game of failure. Being a successful player is being a player who fails 70 percent of the time. That’s ridiculous. Compare that to a basketball player shooting free throws. If you’re making 80 percent, that’s good. You’re only failing 20 percent of the time. In baseball, it’s completely opposite. And I think that’s awesome because it provides you so many opportunities to learn from your mistakes, adapt, get after it the next time and get better.”
Rooks applies those baseball lessons to his life, his music and his classrooms.
So it should come as no surprise that Rooks will continue his studies and baseball career next fall at Brown University, where he’ll study mechanical engineering.
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