Elijah Taylor '22 Recruiting Profile

An incident that happened to me that has altered who I am today as a person is when my family went homeless. The reason why you can say it changed my life is because it happened at a young age and ever since then things have been different in my life.  I feel like it made me mature at a young age because at that time I knew that I had to grow up fast and become a man at  a young age. 

The first time that we went homeless was when I was 13 when we had just moved back to California from Kentucky. My parents had split up and my mom took us away from my dad and moved us back to California. At first we were living with my mom's family friend. Then we moved out and got our own place in loma linda for a little bit then that's when everything started to go downhill because my mom stopped working and wasn't trying to work which wasn't good for us. Then that's when I was able to make money at 13 years old to have the home for one more month but that wasn't enough. So then she wasn't able to pay bills and the rent so then we ended up getting evicted. So we were jumping from hotel to hotel. During that time I was just so upset that I didn't eat much and I wasn't sleeping much either. So it took a toll on me because I was also making sure that my sisters had enough food and sleep and were safe. 

Then after two months of being like that we were finally able to get another home for a little while and it was going well. At first we thought it was going to last for a while but we were wrong. My mom started doing the same thing again and was taking it out on us so I started to become depressed. But I just acted tough in front of my sisters so they won't be sad or anything. So you're probably thinking how that makes you feel like you matured well. I will let you in on a little secret. It made me a stronger person mentally and physically because I worked out during practice to get my mind off it, then mentally I knew that I needed to take care of my little sisters so I made sure they ate and slept and did their homework and got to school and stayed out of trouble. So at a young age I had to become an adult to take care of my people now my goal is to never let us go through something like that again 

My dream is to play college ball and prove to my doubters that they where wrong and to make sure my family never has to struggle again.