SELECCIONES: Leave Your Mark

— -- Eleven-year-old Luis Castillo walked into his house scraped, bruised and bleeding after another day of football practice. "I don't want to do this any more," he pleaded with his mother, Maria, tears streaming down his face.

Her emphatic response was the same this day as it had been every other day. "No, if those other kids can do it, you can do it. You're not going to quit."

Maria wanted Luis to play football because it kept him active and was far preferable to him sitting around watching TV every day after school. She also knew that being involved in organized sports would help keep her only son out of trouble. What she didn't know was that because of his big size, he was 5-feet-eight-inches-tall and close to 140 pounds, the coaches had moved him from the junior team to the senior team where he was playing with kids as old as 14 who were even bigger than he was. "I got killed that year," says Castillo.

Maria's insistence that Luis play football paid off. Eleven years later, he was drafted by the San Diego Chargers of the National Football League and was named a starting defensive end his rookie year, becoming only the second player of Dominican descent to achieve that distinction. In July, he was rewarded with a five-year contract extension valued at $43 million, making him one of the highest paid defensive linemen in the league.

None of this would have been possible without Maria, says Castillo. Not just because she didn't let him quit, but because of the example she set for him as a poor single mother who worked long hours to provide for her son. Her strong work ethic motivated him to not only work his hardest on the football field, but more importantly, he says, to do everything in his power to help those less fortunate.

In July 1983 Maria Nieves Castillo stood before a New York immigration officer in a heavy winter coat trying to hide the fact that she was almost nine months pregnant. Maria was coming from the tiny rural village of Cidra de Tomas, in the Dominican Republic, where she lived in a house with no running water or electricity. She was practically penniless and wanted her first child to be born in the United States in order to have a chance at a better life than she ever had. Maria was also less a month from her 40th birthday and knew this may be her only child. She simply wanted the best for her baby.