It has been almost five years since Jon Medina left Ames for a smaller town, Stuart, IA, and many things have changed since then. Most students may remember him carrying around a can of orange Fanta everyday, but that is the old Jon Medina. One of the things Medina started up after he left was soccer, which he started playing after he moved to Stuart after 7th grade. Now a 4-year varsity player on defense, he plays soccer almost all year around. “I play club soccer in the fall, Iowa Games in the summer, and indoor soccer during winter,” Medina said. “Soccer’s pretty much my life now.” In addition to soccer, Medina also ran track after West Central High allowed students to participate in both track and soccer. This helped the track team grow from 10 members last year to around 25-30 this year. Because of some scheduling conflicts with soccer games and track meets, the students had to pick their “dominant” sport. “I run 400s and hurdles in track,” he said. “It helped out the track team since the program wasn’t as big as the soccer one.” Medina was offered some soccer scholarships at several small colleges and looked at Grandview College in Des Moines, but he will be attending Iowa State University next fall with the Multicultural Vision Program scholarship, which is a full-tuition scholarship, and major in Graphic Design. Medina went to the conference art fair with 4 pieces—two of them received honorable mention and the other two placed 3rd place. The four pieces he took were abstract (a non objective acrylic painting), a figure acrylic painting, a photograph of a flag (black and white processed), and mixed media, in which he took pictures of flowers and made origami flowers with the papers. “If I had to describe myself, I would probably say I’m an artsy guy,” Medina said. “My mom went to school for art and I started drawing things since I was little and in high school, I took everything – painting, drawing, mixed media, and photography. I’ve been into art for a long time and that’s what I’ll be doing in college.” He may not be the same old Jon Medina, carrying around that can of Fanta, perhaps because of all of the athletic activities. But we miss and wish the best of luck to him all the same.