TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Deyna Castellanos is both your typical college freshman, and your not so typical college freshman.
She's funny. She's got a smile on her face all the time. But she's also leading the Seminoles in goals at 17 years old, and never mind the fan pages from her followers in Venezuela.
"It's so weird!" she laughed. Castellanos boasts close to 400,000 followers on Instagram alone. Over 100,000 follow her on Twitter. "So weird, but it's funny at the same time."
"It's nice to see how much support she has," said sophomore teammate Megan Connolly. "She doesn't take it in a bad way, she doesn't take support it a bad way. She takes it and kind of embraces it and uses it in her game."
Three matches. Three goals. Castellanos is using the support perfectly.
"She wants to be the best player that she can be, and we want her to be the best player she can be," said head coach Mark Krikorian. "The fact that she does have such a great following in Venezuela is fantastic for her, it's fantastic for us, and we know that Florida State is pretty popular in Venezuela these days."
"Everything I do here is thinking of the National team and thinking of the Venezuelan people and my family and Venezuela," said Castellanos "For me, Venezuela is the best."
She said the transition to life in Tallahassee has been fairly easy. She's from a college town in Venezuela, and the weather is pretty similar. The hardest thing? Being around a different culture, but on the pitch? The language of soccer is universal.
"Soccer is soccer everywhere," she said. "This part of the class is the easiest, so it's great."
"Everybody knows the game of soccer, the way it's played," said Connolly. "Everybody has their own way of playing it. Once we get on the field, language barriers go, every other barrier goes, it's just play the game you love."
If it's helping the Seminoles win, they love it even more.
