Getting to Know …

Rocco String, Woodstown’s man for all seasons

By Al Muskewitz
Riverview Sports News

WOODSTOWN – Rocco String truly is a man for all seasons. If there’s a game to be played any time during the school year, he’s usually right in the middle of it. He plays football, basketball and baseball for Woodstown and is a force in each.

At 6-foot-6, he’s hard to miss. On the football field he’s a big target as a tight end on offense and a giant terror as a rush end on defense. On the basketball court, of course, he’s the center. And on the baseball diamond, which is his first love, he pitches and plays first base.

The key to being ready in all three is concentrating on diet and doing the things necessary to have his body ready for each very specific grind.

String spent some time with Riverview Sports News before a recent basketball practice where he talked about the demands of being a year-round athlete, how big a grocery sack it takes to fill his gas tank, adjusting to two new head coaches his senior year and his aspirations for the future. The Wolverines open their regular season Wednesday at Salem, where new coach Ramon Roots used to be an assistant.

Here is the full length interview with the Wolverines’ “friendly giant” below.

RIVERVIEW SPORTS NEWS: You really are a man of all seasons. How do you keep up with it all, going from one season right into the other?

ROCCO STRING: It’s more about eating. Drink a lot of water and eating. Every night I go in the hot tub. I make sure my body is all fueled up for the next day. Get cool. Do cold tubs. Mostly my body, just trying to make sure I’m not sore the next day, make sure I’m all stretched out, make sure I’m flexible and able to move into the next sport. 

With football being so physical that was a big toll making sure my body was not all sore, fresh for the next day, fresh for the game, then transition into basketball, make sure my legs were all right. I’m burning 2-3-5,000 calories a day. It’s all about eating.

RSN: OK, give me a sense about your dietary regimen.

RS: In the morning I eat eggs, sausage, bacon. More like 6-8 eggs and then 6 to 8 strips of bacon, four sausages with like four pieces of bread. Sometimes I will miss breakfast because I’ve just got to get up and go. Most of the time I will have time to eat it. I usually do over easy with dipping the toast. That’s good.

Lunch I usually can do like two cheesesteaks or two meatball sandwiches, just anything with two sandwiches and any size. And dinner is more like meat, protein, like getting all the stuff ripped through my body, like steak, chicken, turkey, ham. Whatever my mom cooks. I usually have pasta one or two times a week with different kinds of sauces. Mix it all up.

RSN: Is the multi-sport thing something you’ve always done or just over the last couple years. Some guys might take a break, but you do everything.

RS: When I was younger I played football, baseball and basketball and I stopped playing football just to focus more on baseball. Coming back to Woodstown I wanted to play football again. As I was playing football again it brought back memories about going through all three of the sports.

It really didn’t have a major impact on me because going through three sports it’s more of an athletic thing. I have that, so being able to do that didn’t really affect me as much.

RSN: Luckily the state gives you a little bit of a buffer between each season. Where I was down south the seasons overlapped. How much do you appreciate whatever break you get between seasons and what do you during them to wind down and prep for the next?

RS: We actually went right into (basketball) because of the states (in football) and all that. If I do have that break I’ll kind of relax for a week and if I have two weeks I’ll relax for a week and then start working for a week for the next sport. If I don’t have a break, I’ll relax, eat a lot, drink a lot of water, make sure I’m ready to go for that next sport. If I do have it, I’m taking that week of a break. I think my body needs it, my mind needs it.

RSN: You’re all about maintaining your physical well-being. Have you ever been hurt, outside of the usual stuff that comes with the season?

RS: No. Being my size it’s hard. I’ve seen a lot of guys get hurt really quickly, so the big part is taking care of your body because once you take care of that then you’re basically all right.

RSN: Why do you play these three sports specifically?

RS: I’ve been playing baseball my whole life; that’s my first sport. Basketball, I kind of got into it when I was real young. My sisters played it. I think I was pretty good at it, especially when I got taller; people kept asking me if I played basketball and I would say yeah. I just loved it over the years and it’s my last year of playing all three so I figured to have the most joy out of it.

THE ROCCO FILE

FOOTBALL (TE-DL)	REC	YDS	TD	TKLS	TFL
2024	4	38	1	26	0
2023	0	0	0	2	0

BASKETBALL (C-F)	PPG	RPG	AST	BLK	STL
2023-24	9.2	4.9	32	65	29
2022-23	6.9	5.9	0	32	16

BASEBALL (RHP-1B)	BA	RBI	HR	IP	ERA	K
2024	.289	26	3	E	3.20	15
2023	.392	20	4	8.2	5.65	11

RSN: Have you done any of the other sports – track, wrestling, soccer, golf?

RS: I do golf on my free time for fun with some of my guys who are in college. Town & Country. Centerton. Some courses up north I go to. I’m okay. I wouldn’t say I’m real good, but I’m OK. Some of my buddies are better than me, but I can go with them to where we can play. I played lacrosse for one year (fifth grade), but I didn’t really like it

RSN: What are you – a football player, a basketball player or a baseball player? 

RS: A baseball player. I’ve been playing my whole life. When I real younger I really took it seriously, playing baseball mostly. I really wanted to play just baseball, but my parents really wanted me to play all three sports, so that’s why I kind of play them now. Playing those other two sports helped me out a lot with baseball.

RSN: What are you going to do in college and why is that your sport? You probably have offers in all three.

RS: I want to play baseball. I want to do pitching and hitting and defense, whatever I have to do to help the team.

RSN: What’s the recruiting been like for all three. I’m sure there’s interest across the board.

RS: Basketball is out of the question, like nobody’s been here for basketball, which is obviously; Woodstown basketball is not that great. Football, there’s been a lot of D-II, D-III schools here, which I’ve talked to a lot; all of us guys have talked to them a lot. Baseball I’ve had a lot. I actually went on a visit today to RCSJ in Cumberland. I’ve been to Penn State-Abington and I’ve been to a couple others down south, which were pretty cool, like Alabama and Auburn. I was trying to go down to Florida, but I didn’t have a tournament down there so I couldn’t go.

I just want to play. I want somewhere I can get a degree, but I also want to just play for fun and just have a good time. Everyone says I have a unique size and you can’t teach size, so having that I can definitely work a lot harder with a lot of college guys, help me push a lot harder. And doing one sport at one time is even better.

RSN: Have you given any consideration or asked the programs that are talking to you if you could play multiple sports at their schools?

RS: There are some football coaches in here who say they want dual sport athletes, but I’ll mostly likely just want to focus on one sport.

RSN: Do you think playing multiple sports impacts that recruiting good or bad because they don’t know what sport you favor?

RS: I think it’s good because it shows that you’re very athlete, that you’re a team guy, you play with different people and you learn more about different sports. You’re training for that sport and then you have to transition to a different sport and you have to train for that, which not a lot of people can really do, so I think that’s a special gift to have.

RSN: As a multi-sport guy here you had the unique experience to adjusting to two new head coaches (football with Frank Trautz and basketball with Ramon Roots). That can be a challenge as well. What’s that been like?

RS: Fun, really. Roots was here for football as an assistant and getting to meet him before the (basketball) season was actually a little bit better because you were getting to know him and getting to see how functions around guys.

And Trautz coming in for football, we had him last year as an assistant and with coach (John) Adams stepping down we kind of saw it coming up and being a big part of this team. As we were going through summer camp we kind of thought this could be our year to do the same thing we did last year, which was go pretty far because of Trautz.

He had this big mindset going into the season, brought a lot of new plays in, a lot of new formations and a lot of new guys we had stepping up, which was big.

Even when they were assistants they talked to us about everything. They were there for us, so it really hasn’t changed. They were just always there.

RSN: If I remember right you’re related to Penns Grove football coach Mark Maccarone. That must’ve made that game pretty fun. Are there any other sports luminaries in your family tree?

RS: They’re my dad’s first cousins. It was a real fun game because he actually came over that night after the game, Greg and Mark, and it was real fun. We always talk throughout the season about football games. Even when Greg was at Glassboro coaching for them I always made jokes to him like “You shouldn’t be there, buddy, but you’re there.” He would laugh and whatnot, but we would have our times. Even his son Nick, whose at Montclair State, we talked about football, he gave me some advice and some pointers for it, so they’ve actually been a big help to me. They tell people all around they have a cousin who’s 6-6 who can play all three sports. 

RSN: What makes Woodstown sports so successful every year across the board?

RS: Just working out from freshman year, you’re seeing all the juniors and seniors working and seeing how they move with the game, seeing how their coached and seeing how they are off the field. It’s growing every year, growing every year with your buddies as your group, you get a sense they’re like your brothers and when you’re on the field you’ve got discipline.

All of us as a group, this year as seniors, we all had a mindset we could be how we were last year even with the guys that we lost – and we did it.

RSN: Knowing the story isn’t completely finished, what have been your best one or two all-time Rocco moments so far? 

RS: My first two were the first and second round of the playoffs last year in baseball against Maple Shade and Pennsville. I hit a home run in the fourth inning against Maple Shade to give us a 1-0 lead. That kind of changed the game. And in Pennsville going back-to-back with AP (Andrew Pedrick) that was a cool moment because I don’t that’s been done in a while here at Woodstown and we kind of knew what that game meant. That was our time.

In football it was that championship game against Shore. That was a really fun game for me. That has to be third. Just playing with those group of guys and kicking the crap out of Shore was real fun.

RSN: What did you think of the football season and what are you expectations for basketball?

RS: I think we’ll be OK. I don’t think we’ll be as good as a lot of other teams up north because they breathe basketball up there. Basketball isn’t as strong down here, but we do it to the best of our ability. A lot of times basketball is not our strongest sport, a lot of guys just play it for fun, they play it to get exercise, basketball is just here.

For football at the beginning of the season we heard a lot of talk that we weren’t going to be that good, but we kind of had a chip on our shoulder and when Coach Trautz came in he had a chip on his shoulder, too. He was feeling kind of how we were feeling, like, listen, we’re not going to have anyone talk us down. Beating Delsea first game of the season that kind of ran something through our minds that we’ve got this, we can do it, we just have to work hard at it.

RSN: Can you tell any difference already how basketball is different with Roots here?

RS: We’ve been doing a lot more running, a lot more technical work that we didn’t really get to do last year, which has been helping us a lot. Running has been a big part. Last year we didn’t do much of that and we’ve been doing it every day at the beginning of practice, which is good for us. And we’re doing more defensive work, because that was a big struggle last year.

RSN: What’s Rocco all about off the field. What do you do that’s no sports related?

RS: My family has a construction business (MLS Lawns and Landscapes) that I work on a lot with my dad. I do all the hard work. I wake up at 4 in the morning and pour concrete with the guys. I do all the site work with my dad. And I also work on a farm with my uncle in Harrisonville.

When I’m working, that’s kind of my weight room. It takes a toll on your body, but when I’ve got the chance to go to the weight room I’ll go because I know I need to put a lot of weight on. I want to try to get to 240-250 of just lean muscle because I think that’ll help me out a lot in college. I think if I put on 20 pounds of muscle that’ll be perfect for me.

And I’m either fishing or hunting with my buddies that are around here and being around my girlfriend.

RSN: Just from your size, the position you play, your body type, you remind me of former NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski. Do you get that? 

RS: I’ve heard a lot about that, like you remind me of a professional player of this sport or that sport. I see that, but I don’t really feel like that because it’s just my size.

A lot of guys tell me I look like, baseball wise, Freddie Freeman, because he’s 6-6. Football wise it’s more like Gronk or Travis Kelce, just a tall tight end. In basketball it’s more like a (Nikola) Jokic, a type of guy who’s real tall but plays the game real lanky. There are a lot of people who say stuff like that. 

RSN: Do you have any advice for kids who are playing multiple sports or may be having a hard time in one of the multiple sports they play?

RS: Just be a competitive person but also an energetic, fun and friendly person off the court and field. When you’re on the field you want to be as competitive as you can, talkative as you can, be a leader. 

For baseball I’m a leader. Because I first base I talk to all the guys. Basketball, I’m a leader because I’m a center, making sure everyone’s in their places. Football, all of us were leaders, all of guys as seniors. When you’re on the field you have to have a mindset that you’re the guy everyone trusts, you’re the guy who puts people in position. I’ve gotten that the last couple years, I’ve kind of built that up. I’ve seen it in myself, telling guys where to go.

Don’t be scared of doing other sports. Try it. Even if it’s the first time. You’ll get coached. When you’re a little kid, like 10-12 years old, just try. Just do as many sports as you can. It won’t hurt you. It’ll just make you better.

RSN: Thanks for taking the time for this. We do these extended interviews in hopes of introducing people to the personalities of the players they watch beyond the arena.

RS: Just a friendly giant, that’s all.