How Clemson baseball's Jacob Hinderleider found success by 'playing freely'

CLEMSON – As a graduate student working toward a master’s degree in data science and analytics, Jacob Hinderleider knows that numbers can be skewed to produce some misleading results.

But as a longtime baseball player, he also knows that statistics don’t lie.

By any measure, Hinderleider has to be pleased with his numbers through 49 games as a member of the Clemson baseball team – a .319 batting average with 12 home runs and 53 RBIs.

A transfer from Davidson College, Hinderleider is one of the primary reasons the Tigers are ranked No. 4 and atop the ACC Atlantic Division heading into the final week of the regular season.

But college baseball hasn’t always gone so swimmingly for the native of Kaneohe, Hawaii, who struggled in his first two seasons at Davidson.

How Jacob Hinderleider was slowed by mind games

The culprit was one that plagues almost all athletes at one point or another – namely, psychological duress.

“I was putting too much pressure on myself,” Hinderleider said. “I had too high of expectations and I wasn’t allowing myself to fail. That just put me in a bad spot mentally, and it just kept on spiraling.”

Hinderleider batted a chilly .198 during his first two seasons at Davidson, then underwent a transformation – not with a tweak to his swing or stance, mind you, but rather an overhaul of his approach and mentality.

A philosophical do-over, if you will.

“I learned from that experience that I need to enjoy the time out here and just be grateful for the opportunity,” Hinderleider said. “That helped take away the pressure that’s easy to put on yourself.

“When you do that, you’re just playing free and playing to compete. You’re not putting too much emphasis on your individual performance, but just the performance of the team as a whole. That helps a lot.”

It did.

He hit .336 and .282 the next two seasons and earned second-team All-Atlantic 10 Conference honors in 2022, when he also had a 22-game hitting streak.

The reversal of his fortunes coincided with his adoption of a new mindset unencumbered by the pressures typically inherent in the sport.

How to 'play freely' and succeed

Essentially he found the advantages of what he calls “playing freely.”

A similar approach has been the key to success for many an athlete, regardless of sport.

The value of stepping back, pausing and taking a deep breath cannot be overstated. It’s not that you’ve stopped caring or have lost interest but rather reached a point where you no longer allow pressure to control your game or performance.

Hand-eye coordination, bat speed and focus all are integral components to baseball success, but so too is a player’s psyche.

“The grad guys talk about it pretty frequently,” Hinderleider said. “We just know that this could be our last baseball opportunity, so we might as well take it and have fun with it as much as we can.”

That relaxed approach, both at the plate and in the field, where Hinderleider has distinguished himself at both shortstop and first base this season, is quite the salve for tension and anxiety.

“That freeness, that looseness, that’s not easy to find,” said Rucker Taylor, Hinderleider’s former coach at Davidson. “The bazillion dollar question is, 'How do you get there and how do you stay there'?

“I think it’s understanding that one at-bat is one at-bat, that one error is just one error. His last two years at Davidson and watching him on the ACC Network now, there’s a looseness, there’s a freeness that has served him well.”

There’s no question that what goes on between the ears is rather important.

Just ask Clemson coach Erik Bakich, who is in his second season with the Tigers after guiding Michigan to five NCAA Tournaments in his last seven years there, including the finals of College World Series in 2019.

“We got the most out of our teams at Michigan not because we were the most talented team from the neck down, but because of what we had from the neck up,” Bakich said.

To their credit, Jacob Hinderleider and his 2024 Clemson teammates appear to be cut from a similar cloth, and that could translate into a trip to Omaha next month.

Scott Keepfer covers Clemson athletics for The Greenville News and the USA TODAY Network. Email him at  skeepfer@gannett.com and follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @ScottKeepfer

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: How Clemson baseball's Jacob Hinderleider learned to overcome pressure