After days of constant sweating and cooling off in ice cold baths, senior athletes Ismael Gonzales and Joshua Cartwright rise above others to fulfill their dreams to go to college and get a degree while doing what they have always done in the field and off the beaten path.

Unlike other athletes, both Cartwright and Gonzales pursue dreams that are not only focused in athletics but in what they want to be in the future.

“I also want to major in mechanical engineering and maybe major in physics to become a teacher,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales, boy’s track captain, took any open opportunity he had to show what he was capable of. During one of his cross country meets his junior year against McKinney Boyd High School, Gonzales recognized the Southern Arkansas University cross country recruiter and decided then that he was going to show everything he had.

“Once I finished the race I was dead tired,” Gonzales said.  “I finished one of the best races I have ever ran.”

Cartwright has been playing football since middle school earning him several plaques and awards for the many efforts he has put into the team. With the hard work that he has done, Coach Castillo took highlighted tapes of Cartwright playing football and sent them to several colleges, for him to get noticed.

“I am going to follow through college [with the football scholarship] if I can and then try to go into kinesiology as my major,” Cartwright said.

On February 6 in the Curtis Culwell Center both Cartwright and Gonzales were signed to the colleges where they will attend this fall. Cartwright was signed to Midwestern State University with a football scholarship, and Gonzales signed with Southern Arkansas University with a track/cross country scholarship.

“We like it both to be great at football and great people and he is really that,” Castillo said. “He’s really bright, he is kind of our shining star, and he exemplifies what we want in the program and how we want to be represented.”