April 18 - Cassie Smith (she comes from a large, ethnically-diverse family)
April 21 - Makenna Sullivan (she is a Leap-Year Baby)
April 28 - Kacy Eckley (she used to be one of the top youth golfers in the country)
June 8 - Monica Rios (she was born in Puerto Rico)
June 17 - Haley Kemper (she is into four different types of boardsports)
June 23 - Emmi Carroll (she has broken 12 bones in her lifetime)
July 11 - Allison Werner (she attended private Catholic school for grades K-12)
July 19 - Mikayla Brillon (she attended the prestigious NCAA Career in Sports Forum this summer)
August 1 - Anna Hall (she was a star forward in high school before becoming a goalkeeper)
September 1 - Jordan Foster (she has ziplined upside down in the jungles of Honduras)
September 22 - Sutton Edwards (she can solve a Rubik's Cube)
October 7- Idalys Rea (she once caught a shark in the Gulf of Mexico)
October 13 - Bailly Bounds (her car was once followed by a swarm of bees)
November 2 - Tara Claus (she is a big fan of rapper Machine Gun Kelly)

RICHMOND, Ky. – Over the spring and summer, we will be profiling members of the Eastern Kentucky soccer team. Next up: freshman Sam Eastes.

Sam, a forward from Carmel, Indiana, once took a week-long hiking trip into the Colorado Rockies.

EKUSports: Have you always been into hiking?

Sam Eastes: I always kind of liked the idea of hiking, but I never really got the chance to experience a hiking trip until my Young Life group offered the trip. It was during the summer of 2016. We spent a whole week around Creed, Colorado. We were just completely submerged in the mountains so we had to carry everything on our back. It was an interesting experience. 

ES: How much did your group hike per day?

SE: We kind of just walked around all day. We hiked 3-5 miles per day with our packs that had our clothes, food, and shoes. We would hike until we found flat ground and slept in tents. 

ES: Did you have cell service?

SE: We actually weren't allowed to have cell phones. I went a whole week without my phone. I liked the break of getting away from everything.

ES: Did you see any wildlife?

SE: We saw a moose, about 20 yards away from where we were set up. We also saw some marmots.

ES: Any memorable stories from your trip?

SE: I tore my ACL going into my senior year of high school, a year before this trip. I hit the one-year anniversary of my surgery during the trip, so it was very memorable to be able to hike and do all of these active things for the first time post-knee surgery.

ES: What did you eat on the trip?

SE: They pre-packaged all of the meals we ate and we would carry them. One night we had tacos. For breakfast we would have hot chocolate every morning, biscuits and honey, oatmeal and for lunch we would have sandwiches. 

ES: How was the overall experience?

SE: It was really neat. I'm a spiritual person and that was the closest physically and spiritually I've been to God. I love the view that we got to see every morning. We didn't have our phones so we almost never knew what time it was. Only our leaders had their phones for emergencies. We would just wake up before the sun would even rise and we had no idea what time it was. They told us at the end that we woke up at 4:00 or 5:00 every morning and then would hike until around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. 

I got a tattoo based off of the trip. It's a little butterfly. On the trip, any time it got hard or I would just be thinking in my head "I can't do this", a white butterfly would go by me. That helped me. It was a physical reminder that God is with me, walking. I have Psalm 23:4 below the tattoo, because that's what we talked about on the trip.