1
0
Earlier this year, during the preference assembly, Beto Tapia signed for New Mexico State
University for soccer.
“I feel good about it,” Tapia said. “I’m pretty nervous. I like to tell myself I’m just a little bit nervous, but it feels good, like all my hard work paid of.”
Tapia has been playing soccer for many years.
“I started in a city league team in frst grade, so I was like six or seven,” Tapia said.
Over the years, he’s been to soccer camps at colleges across the country starting when he was around thirteen years old.
“Most people get picked up by club soccer, but I can’t really aford club soccer because it’s
pretty expensive,” Tapia said. “So what I would do is, me and my brother would go to diferent
camps that we’d get invited to… we went to the New Mexico one. It was a week long. That’s how I
got picked up.”
Tapia has been described as a caring and honest person.
“I really like that he’s an honest person,” Tapia’s girlfriend, junior Jasmin Canales, said. “He’s always looking to help people even if he doesn’t know them, and he’s really just always looking for the good in
people. He’s a really thoughtful person.”
Tapia is known as someone who always tries to help others.
“It was my frst year playing,” Canales said, “and it was really hard for me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d never really
played soccer before. Some other girls were in the same place… and he would just teach us how to control the ball. How to kick it with the inside of our foot. And just little drills to understand what we were doing.”
In addition to that, Tapia is a willing learner on the pitch. He listens and tries hard to learn something from his coaches and others.
“He’s coachable, and driven. Ever since he was little he’s had a passion for it. He’s always had drive,” Tapia’s brother and
soccer coach, Julio Tapia, said. “It’s really good to have somebody that has those qualities… but is also a leader. It’s easier to control a team and get them more motivated when the leader on their team is coachable.”
However, Tapia hasn’t always been well known and talkative. When he was younger, he
used to be shy.
“It takes him a while to get out of his bubble and approach anybody,” Julio Tapia said. “Even though it might not seem
like it, he’s a shy kid. And so it takes a second especially if he’s completely new to somebody. For example, throughout high school, we’ve taken him to different camps throughout the states. Progressively he’s grown in those camps. The very frst time, he was thirteen, almost fourteen. He went to a discovery camp in Montana.”
The discovery camps had people of many diferent ages, meaning he was there with people who were way older than
him.
“[With] sixteen to twenty year-olds, and he was the youngest…you could tell he was terrifed. We just continued doing
that throughout the years and slowly he’s been embracing his leadership, embracing himself. He’s learned to get along with people,” Julio Tapia said.
Consequently, Tapia has learned that success has to be worked toward, it isn’t just randomly given out. One thing that
shows his success is that last year, Tapia scored 57% of the soccer team’s goals.
“You always gotta do extra. You can’t just play during the season and then get picked up like that,” Beto Tapia said.
Along with that, people who know him well have seen how hard he has worked to get to the point he’s at now.
“I feel like people don’t know how hard he worked for this,” Canales said. “A lot of people are just like, ‘oh he’s lucky to
be chosen’ or ‘he has the skill’, but he’s been working his whole life to get to this point, and he’s had a lot of people support him. Especially his brother, Julio. It’s not something that he was lucky to get. It’s something he’s worked
for, earned, and deserves.”
