WXXV Student Athlete of the Week: Gulfport Soccer’s Drew Corbin
Soccer may be the most popular sport in the world, but here in America only about 7.9 percent of high school men’s soccer players end up competing in the sport at the collegiate level, but our WXXV Student Athlete of the Week isn’t backing down from the challenge and instead he uses it as motivation.
Growing up in Gulfport, Drew Corbin doesn’t really remember a time he didn’t have a ball at his feet. The Admiral began his soccer campaign at the early age of five years old and when he put on the orange and blue Bayou View jersey, he quickly realized the potential he had as a goal keeper. “Probably around middle school is when I realized the potential of playing soccer in college and then being able to get an education while playing soccer made me stick with it and keep playing as a goalkeeper.”
Along with falling in love with the sport more and more as the year’s go by, Corbin says it also taught him some very valuable life lessons. “It’s taught me what it means to have a family beside you like a second family that’s not just your parents with players on your team, and then also it teaches me life lessons like how to deal with losing, getting back up again and then also it teaches you what it takes to be the very best at your sport.”
If Drew isn’t the very best at the sport, he sure is pretty close.
Just last season, he played in the Mississippi Coast Boys Soccer Game and was named the defensive player of the game, was selected to the All District Team, and was named the most Valuable Player for the Gulfport Admirals.
All of these honors and much more for Corbin are the exact results of his hard work and determination that he hopes will one day take him to the Division I level. “I plan on hopefully playing at Division I soccer. If not, I have Division II offers I can go with, but I’m trying to go Division I, so I’ll be going to showcases this year for those offers.”
Just like he mentioned, Corbin isn’t afraid to go the extra mile, or hundreds of miles in this case, to make his dream come true.
Realizing the odds are against him earning a top scholarship to play soccer at the next level in the United States, Corbin puts in extra time in the classroom to help his own cause. “I’ll probably be going to North Carolina next Saturday, so it’s a lot of travel, so it’s just more of being able to set time away to study for my classes and everything to make sure I’m the best I can be in classes. If I don’t have good enough grades, I won’t be able to play soccer and it also helps me for college with scholarships and stuff because in soccer, you don’t get as much money than other sports so it helps you out a lot.”
In Corbin’s case, it helps a whole lot. He is currently ranked 24th in his senior class and he’s currently sitting on an ACT score of 30 while also tackling soccer seven days a week.
He is confident that one day he’ll be rewarded for his commitment and diligence to the game and right now he’s focused on his senior season as a Gulfport Admiral. “We’re basically retuning the same team that we had last year. We only lost one starter from last year, it was a Senior center back, and now we have a Junior coming in who wasn’t able to play last year but is able to play this year and it’s about the same team so it should be a good strong run this year and hopefully make it to state.”
