I'm going to turn the mic over to one of your teammates, someone who wants to talk about and bring awareness to what October is about. For those of you that don't know or had Mr. Bernardi for health, he probably forgot to teach about it. I always teach about it. All right. 320,000 women this year alone in the United States are possibly going to be diagnosed with breast cancer. So, to share some insight, to share a story, and hopefully raise some awareness to this, David Casteel.

So, I want to thank Coach Marshall for giving me the opportunity to speak to you guys. The month of October is a very important and special month for me because of what it stands for. Many athletes see the color pink as something stylish to add to your game. However, for me and many others in our community, it represents so much more than that. During part of my football career, my mother went through and overcame breast cancer. During this time, football was an outlet for me, something to look forward to every day and get my mind off what my family was going through. Many families in Valpo have struggled through this horrible disease. People we walk the hall with each day have lost mothers, grandmothers, and other family members to breast cancer.

When people from Valpo are able to come to our games and see us wearing pink in the socks and stuff, in support of breast cancer, it helps them realize that they have people there for them and that they have a support system, kind of. And just, there's no real cure or way to prevent cancer except for a really long and painful treatment process and getting checkups annually and when you notice irregularities. So, it's just important to remind the women in your life to get checkups, make sure they're getting things taken care of so that it doesn't sneak up on them and you don't have anything tragic happen to one of your family members. And so, that's why we're all getting socks for our game tomorrow and then it's really important that you remember them for the rest of the games for October so that we're all matching. And I just, yeah, that's about it.

Again, one more round of applause for David and the courage to come up and talk about especially something that could be personal to him and his family, and obviously his mother who is still with us here as well as part of the quarterback club board. And also a huge thanks to them for the purchase of those socks that you all had in your lockers. David brings up a great point to be able to go ahead and show the support. Even though it may not impact your family, there are families of people that you're seated next to that have had to go through this, will go through this, or may have had lives taken from them because of this disease. So, with that, a huge round of applause not just for David but the Casteels, and anybody else that were helping and recognizing too.