College Basketball Player Comes Out To His Team

                                                                               

Drew University’s starting catcher, Matt Kaplon, hid a big secret from his teammates for the last three seasons. After 21 years of struggling to hide who he was to the world, Matt decided it was time to finally share with his Coach and teammates that he is gay.

Kaplon is a star on his Drew University team, starting at catcher 97 games his first three seasons and was third on the team with a .327 batting average last season, throwing out 13 runners in 29 starts. Hew was also voted his team’s most valuable player in his senior year at Palisades Park High School in Bergen County, N.J.

Last week, he told his head coach, Brian Hirschberg, that we was gay. Hirschberg was not fazed by the revelation. “He’s as close to a family member as anyone I’ve ever coached,” Hirschberg told Outsports. “He’s like a younger brother to me. When Matt shared his story with me, I respected him more, if that’s even possible.”

Matt made the decision with the help of his coach, to tell his team this weekend before the start of this season. He didn’t want to play a single game without them knowing exactly who he is.

On Sunday, as his team gathered for a planned community service event, Kaplon addressed his teammates in a classroom simply saying: “I’m gay.”

“Growing up in sports, you kind of hear this stigma that being gay isn’t OK,” Kaplon said. “That traveled with me into college.”

OutSports adds:

Part of that distinct message about being gay in sports was the language around baseball. “Faggot” and “sissy” and other homophobic slurs have been present in the sports world for decades: High school baseball in New Jersey is no different.

“There were the comments I’d hear on the field. It wasn’t directed at anyone and no one meant anything by it, but it meant something to me. It further solidified in my head that it wasn’t OK and that people were against it and they were against having a gay friend or a teammate.”

Those comments have continued at Drew. Even Hirschberg admits he’s heard homophobic language on his team, including the word “faggot.”

“Having played myself and seeing the climate we’re in now as a sports culture, it’s not easy to be a gay athlete,” Hirschberg said. “It takes a lot of courage I think to come out. I’m still learning a lot of this myself.”

During his annual month-long family trips to North Truro, Mass., just outside the gay mecca of Provincetown, Kaplon began to grow comfortable with his own sexuality:

Being able to go to P’town every August and spend the month there and see gay people right in front of me while I was still grappling with it, it was good for me. It proved to me that I wasn’t the only person who was gay. But I still felt like I was the only athlete.

Matt reached out to Hillsdale College basketball player Derek Schell, after reading about his coming out story last October, according to OutSports:

“Words cannot describe what Derek has meant to me,” Kaplon said. “He saved my life.”

Kaplon finally found the strength to come out to friends and family after Thanksgiving break last November. A young woman in his circle of friends had pursued him for years to no avail. Some of his friends began wondering if he liked women at all. Driving home one night with his high school friend Lewis, the question finally came up: “Are you gay?”

Kaplon denied it.

“I lied to my best friend about myself,” he said. “It made me think a lot about who I was and who I was going to be.”

A couple weeks later, around Christmas break, Kaplon told Lewis that he’s gay. His friend’s positive reaction gave him further confidence to come out to everyone he knew. When he read Outsports’ story of Willamette College football player Conner Mertens last month, Kaplon knew it was time to share this side of himself with his teammates. He didn’t want to live a lie in his final season with the team – Schell and Mertens showed him that he didn’t have to.