Kelton Castillo '21 Recruiting Profile

Being an immigrant in the United States isn’t easy, there are many opportunities that I am denied. I am 17 years old and I was born in Honduras. I moved to the United States at the age of 10. I have overcome every obstacle that has come my way. I believe that my education and my baseball skills are my ticket up the social class, like that I could open a path, not just for me but for those who will come after me. I’ve been playing baseball since I was 8 years old, and ever since it has been my dream to make it to the big leagues. Baseball is my passion, it's the thing that I excel at. My freshman year summer I faced some complications trying to play the sport that I love so much. I signed up to play baseball for Carrolton Boosters, the sign up fee was about $130. Once the fee was paid and I entered all the required information, I was told when and where tryouts would be. I was so excited and a bit nervous. The day of tryouts I showed up to the field and something immediately caught my eyes, there were only two other Black kids trying out. I was shocked because in my country most of the ball players were Black; so, I grew worried that I would be overlooked because my “kind” were a minority. I still did my best and a few days passed until I got notified what team I was placed into. My team was mostly white and the coach was also White, only having three other Black kids apart from me on the team. It was a summer team so we barely had any practices and if we did, not everyone showed up. In one of the few practices we had we were hitting, I hit the ball all the way to the fence, while many of my other teammates barely got a hit. As the season progressed I started to notice that the White kids in the team were playing more than the Black kids on the team, even if they didn’t show up to practice or made errors, the White kids were still guaranteed to play. Everyone in the team had to bat, but even though my batting skills were higher than most of my teammates I was among the last ones to hit along with the rest of the Black kids in the team. For a while I felt like I wasn’t enough, like I didn’t belong, like the sport I love so much was not meant for me. I remember talking to my Black teammates about it and they weren’t really faced by it, two of them didn’t want to be there to begin one and the other one just didn’t care. It was frustrating because I never in my life had experienced something like that, I’ve never had been put down to the point that I wanted to quit something. However, I decided to use that experience as motivation. I began to work ten times harder to perfect my skills and become the best baseball player I can be so that I wouldn’t be overlooked again. I have put in more than ten thousand hours into baseball and I will continue to do that no matter what because it’s my passion.