As Maryland baseball’s Maxwell Costes glanced around a packed stadium at Illinois in April 2019, something came over him. There wasn’t a single person that looked like him in the sea of fans that filled the stands.
“That was one of the first times I ever felt like I could put a feeling to the word other,” Costes told Testudo Times. “I could notice that me and Chris [Alleyne] and AJ [Lee] were getting heckled a lot more than other kids were. And when I heard the racial slurs coming from the stands and stuff, that’s when it really hit me.