Wake Forest players share meaning of team slogan: 'Make them feel you'

Wake Forest has an intriguing team motto going into the College World Series and Brock Wilken and Rhett Lowder provided an explanation.

Ahead of a matchup with Stanford in Game 1 Saturday, Wilken and Lowder explained the meaning of “Make them feel you.” On the surface, that’s one that’s certainly new to college baseball.

Heck, the Demon Deacons are the favorites to win it all so they can say whatever they want.

“It’s a motto we came up with on our fall retreat as a team, and that motto means every person that we interact with, we have to make them feel us in whatever way,” Wilken said. “It’s always in a positive and energetic way. The more we can do that, the more people we impact and leave a legacy, that means the world to us.”

But it’s a positive message regardless of where it goes, according to Lowder.

“Yeah, he covered it pretty much in full,” Lowder said. “It’s pretty much every person you run into, like you said, it could be your own teammate. If they’re slacking in any way, you have to make them feel you. I don’t know. Pretty cool.”

Whatever went on with Wake Forest this year, the team won over 50 games and head coach Tom Walter claimed the team actually exceeded expectations.

“I think they’ve exceeded them,” Walter said. “Again, for us to be sitting here 52-10, I wouldn’t have thought that. I thought we had a good chance to win the regular season championship. I thought we would be in the mix for that, but to do it the way we did, so convincingly, to not have lost a series all year, to not have lost back-to-back games all year is a really big testament to not only their consistency but their toughness.

“They’ve certainly exceeded expectations in every way, shape, or form, but the good news is I’m not even sure we’ve played our best baseball yet. I feel like we can play better than we’ve been playing.”

Playing their best baseball? Sheesh. Wake Forest might be bringing something crazy to Omaha.

“Again, the first game against Alabama was certainly no blow-out,” Walter said. “They gave us all we could handle, and it was a good game that could have went either way. It came down to the last pitch of the game. Again, that second game for the first three, four innings of that game, it certainly didn’t feel like a blow-out. We were able to extend the lead, but at our ballpark when the wind is blowing out like that, even when it’s 10-3, you don’t feel super comfortable.

“We’re battle-tested. We’ve been through our league. We’ve been through the conference tournament, the regional, and now. For our guys, again, they — and they said it both really well. They do a good job of kind of staying on us. We know, we feel like if we do our thing, we’re going to be in really good shape and be who we are. As we like to say, just play normal. Just go out there and do what we’ve done all year.”