Talk to anyone who knows former Palisades High football star Rob Gillett and you’ll hear many of the same words and phrases repeated over and over again: humble, hard-working, hard-hitting, bright, loyal, gifted, respectful, quiet. But one word perhaps best describes Gillett’s story better than others: unique. It’s that uniqueness which defines the 22-year-old’s high school and college career to the point where the details of his life, his football accomplishments and career aspirations seem unbelievable. From his humble beginnings growing up the youngest of six children in South Los Angeles to playing in a PaliHi playoff game as a freshman to traveling 3,000 miles across the country to attend Brown to his aspirations of becoming a doctor, the fifth-year senior linebacker has seemingly packed a life’s worth of academic and athletic experience into the last decade, applying a Herculean work-ethic as he carves out exactly what he wants out of life. Better yet: Gillett would be the last person to ever sing his praises or point out his accomplishments. So where to begin with his story? Perhaps when Gillett’s own football career began at the age of eight. Prior to joining his Pop Warner team, he stuck mostly to baseball, which suited him, given that Rob wasn’t an imposing youngster. ’He was skinny, pretty tiny,’ his father, Rob Sr. said. ‘At first, I told him to stay in baseball: ‘You won’t get hurt.” Rob Jr.’s simple reply: ‘I want to hit.’ And with that, Gillett’s young football career was born. His first year didn’t go quite as planned’his mother Olive remembers his team lost every game that season, leaving Rob Jr. in midseason tears’but from a young age, his passion for hitting was born (ironic, considering his parents, both of whom were born in Belize, knew nothing of American football growing up). At the same time, Rob Jr. excelled in school despite growing up in an area where, he said, ‘very few people took pride in education.’ A straight-A student starting in elementary at Normandie Magnet and later at Aubudon Middle School, he was ‘always at the top of his class,’ Olive said. ‘A math genius,’ Rob Sr. added. By the time ninth grade rolled around, attending Palisades High was something of a foregone conclusion, even though it came with the daylong commitment of riding the bus. ’Being that two of our kids went there before, he had to go there,’ Rob Sr. said. ‘It’s a great school. I didn’t want him to go to school in this area, all the gang-banging and that stuff . . . Palisades got him where he’s at. That’s the way I see it and the way he sees it. No matter what he does, he’ll always be a Palisades guy.’ On the field, Gillett was forced into action right away. As a freshman, he was called up from the JV team for the varsity playoff game against El Camino Real. ’They threw me in at middle linebacker, and I’m one of the smallest dudes on the field,’ Gillett recalled. ‘After the first play, I got most of my jitters out and started going full speed. From there, I was fine.’ The rest of his football career with the Dolphins was a success’as long as he was healthy. He maintained a 4.1 GPA and starred at running back and linebacker over the next three years, sharing the team MVP award with Mitchell Schwartz (now a senior offensive lineman at Cal) his senior year in 2006. ’He didn’t come off the field,’ Rob Sr. said of his son’s games. ‘He played the whole game. He would say, ‘I can handle it. My team needs me,’ and was ready to go tomorrow again. That’s the culture of how we are; we’re hard workers and we don’t give up.’ No kidding. In the middle of his junior year at Pali, Gillett tore his right tricep. After the game, he couldn’t take off his jersey’but he refused to let it keep him off the field. ’He was killing himself. I told him, ‘You can’t play, you’re hurt,” said Rob Sr., after taking his son to get an MRI which confirmed the injury. It didn’t matter. He kept playing. Then, following his senior year, Gillett re-injured the muscle and underwent a second surgery’right as he was faced with the ultimate decision for any student-athlete: where to go to college. In the end, he narrowed his choice to either the comfort of nearby UCLA or the faraway allure of the Ivy League and Brown. Each had its own appeal. After visiting Brown, he told the coaches there he was ready to commit’but days later, UCLA offered him a preferred walk-on spot on the team and a partial scholarship, which was enough to convince him to become a Bruin. ’I was torn,’ Gillett said. ‘UCLA was close to home and I always wanted to play in the PAC-10. So I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to go to UCLA.’ Soon after, he spoke with Paul Frisone, Brown’s outside linebackers coach (who was recruiting Rob Jr.) and told him his decision. A day later, Frisone was in the Gillett’s living room. ’I remember that day so vividly,’ Frisone said. ‘I flew from Indianapolis with shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes, drove straight to his house and talked to Rob and his family for three hours. Rob didn’t say two words. I walked out thinking, ‘Well, I’ll find out in August if he’s coming or not.” Sure enough, the 5-foot-11, 215-pound linebacker made it to Brown’and by all accounts, Rob made the right decision. An engineering and economic double major (the first time in Frisone’s 11 years at Brown that one of his players double-majored with engineering), Gillett has somehow found a way to juggle an extremely intensive course load and football, earning a 3.0 GPA along the way. Not to mention his work over the last three years for Making Moves Mentoring, where he tutors and mentors Providence inner-city high school students. On the field, Gillett has enjoyed plenty of success’playing in all 10 games and recording 17 tackles as a sophomore and starting at linebacker and recording 31 tackles his junior year. But perhaps no one moment was greater than September 27, 2010. The third game of Gillett’s senior year, the contest pitted Brown vs. Harvard (one of the biggest rivalries in the Ivy League). Down 6-0 in the second quarter, Harvard is backed up deep in its own territory and quarterback Andrew Hatch drops back to pass on with Gillett shuffling back into coverage. Hatch heaves the ball into Gillett’s vicinity’but it’s under-thrown, allowing Gillett to step in front for the interception. He sidesteps a handful of Harvard players, racing as fast as he can across the 40 yards separating himself and the endzone. He dives for the goal line and comes up just a foot short, but is still mobbed by his fellow Brown defenders, as the 17,360 fans at Brown Stadium’s first night football game go crazy. It’s the biggest game of Gillett’s senior season’and he has found himself on the receiving end of the game’s biggest play. Brown went on to win, 29-14, and things couldn’t have been any better. But only a week later, things suddenly couldn’t have become worse. On the opening kickoff at Rhode Island, Gillett sprinted downfield as part of Brown’s kickoff coverage team. Before making it to the returner’and without being hit by any blocker’he planted his foot to cut up field and his left knee buckled. His ACL was torn. His season was over. So too was his career’or so he thought. ’It was probably the worst feeling I’ve ever had,’ Gillett said. ‘A week earlier, I have the biggest day of my career. The next week, my career is done in my mind.’ At that point, one-third of the way into his senior season, Gillett was assumed he would never play football again. But his coaches remained supportive, along with his family, thousands of miles away. Even still, potentially coming back in 2011 as a fifth-year senior seemed unlikely. ’The coaches were great,’ Gillett said. ‘(Their support) was one of the reasons why I went to Brown. I wasn’t just a number. They stayed behind me and supported me throughout the whole process.’ But it was the advice of his namesake that seemed to make the ultimate difference. ’My family had my back,’ Gillett continued. ‘They steered me in the right direction. I talked to my dad and he helped convince me to keep playing. He said, ‘We don’t leave things half-done. Football has been a huge part of your life for so long, you’ll always regret it if you don’t finish things and complete your career.’ I’m very happy with how it’s turned out.’ Said Frisone: ‘Rob knew he was going to have to challenge himself to do great things. He has a ton of pride, wants to succeed and just goes about his business. A lot of guys might have skipped a fifth year following an injury like that, but he knew he wasn’t ready to stop playing the game he loves.’ With that, Gillett started an exhaustive rehab process that stretched some 10 months. Amazingly, in that process of rehabbing, working with Brown trainers and his surgeon, Dr. Paul Fadale, and seeing the interworkings of the medical field, he soon had an epiphany. ‘Once I got back on my feet, I definitely thought, ‘Damn, that happened.’ But maybe it happened for a reason.” The reason didn’t take long to see. A light turned on and the path towards a career in medicine was illuminated. He quickly decided to use the rest of his time at Brown towards fulfilling pre-med requirements, while also shadowing three doctors (an arthroscopic surgeon, a spinal-specialist and a family practitioner) this summer. ’It really made me realize what is involved,’ Gillett said. ‘I got to see surgeries for a lot of patients and I really enjoyed it. My earlier (engineering) internships I found kind of monotonous and wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. '(The shadowing) was a chance to see how patients look up to doctors, rely on them for support and to take care of their needs. It really made an impact. And I feel like I found the career that’s going to make me happy.’ The commitment has come with sacrifices: Gillett decided to forgo summer break in Los Angeles, electing instead to take summer school in New Orleans. Better (or worse) still: he elected to take two of his pre-med requirements, Organic Chemistry I and II, in the same semester, despite technically needing the knowledge of I to adequately complete II. He finally returned to L.A. for three weeks in August before going back to Brown but spent most of his time back studying for the medical school exam, the MCATs’a test that typically requires six months to a year of study. According to Rob Sr., for the first time in his life, his son told him he wasn’t ready for a test: '(Rob Jr.) said, ‘I’m not ready, but I’m going to take it anyway. I want to see that I can do it. I know I won’t make what I want to make this time, but I want to see that I can beat it. And I know next time I take it, I can.” Such an attitude starts at Gillett’s home, where his story began. ’We’re blessed,’ Rob Sr. says of his family. ‘All my kids are hard-working, and we stay together.’ Literally. Rob Sr., a contractor, even built a house next door to the family’s longtime residence for his youngest daughter, Melissa (who doubles as a chef and RN): meanwhile, two of Rob Jr.’s older brothers are training to be firefighters. Said Brown’s Frisone: ‘Rob Gillett is a great person and his family are great, hard-working people. He deserves what he has, because he’s worked for it. The sky is the limit for him, because that’s what he’s looking for.’
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