Spend any time around Sergio Castillo and one of his true skills – beyond his ability to kick the ball through the uprights at a record rate – is his gift in making everyone else around him comfortable.
He is quick to laugh, has a self-effacing sense of humour and brings what he calls a ‘Chngon mindset’ – Mexican Spanish for ‘bad-ass’ – to how he attacks every single day.
In short, he paints the portrait of a man comfortable in his own skin.
Interestingly, it’s taken years for him to get to this point which, as he said repeatedly during a 17-minute Zoom call with the media Monday after signing a contract extension with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, now has him at ease with his game approach and at peace with his life.
That’s no small thing, clearly, in a gig where success and failure is so black and white.
“It’s like, why couldn’t I have figured this out when I was 24?” said Castillo, now 33, with a chuckle. “I kept asking myself that question last year. Honestly, I think after 2021 and 2022… I went through some anxiety in 2020 once I knew I was going to be a dad. My thoughts were just running wild, thoughts of a future parent.”
“After I had that bad game (while with the New York Jets in 2020) I started thinking about the next game. How am I going to do, rather than just focusing on the day-to-day process. Once I broke it down like that in 2022 and especially in 2023 where I’m just going to enjoy Day 1; I’m not even going to focus on Saturday or whenever we’re playing. I’m just going to worry about Day 2, Day 3 and whenever that Day 4 came. That’s all I’m worried about.”
Critical to that, Castillo said, were simple things like not taking work home with him to his family and finding hobbies away from the game, like golf – ‘which I still suck at’ – and photography.
There’s also this: after bouncing around the pro football map – remember, he’s in his third stint with the Blue Bombers alone and has kicked four Ottawa, B.C., Hamilton and Edmonton in addition to stints in the NFL and XFL – he’s found a home here in Winnipeg.
He touched on that Monday, after giving his shout-outs to long-snapper Mike Benson and holder Jamieson Sheahan.
“More than anything I finally felt where I was in a state of mind where I was at peace,” he said, when asked to reflect on his 2023 season which saw him set a club record by connecting on 90.2 percent of his field-goal attempts. “I didn’t feel stressed, tense, like I did before in the previous years, even though I did well. But this is the first time in my career where I just felt at ease.”
“Before, I would go out running like, ‘Oh, I better make this,’ and now I’m like, ‘Alright, it’s just another field goal.’ And been doing this day-in and day-out. But it also goes with the culture that Osh (head coach Mike O’Shea) has created in the locker room. It’s not a tense environment. Yeah, everyone knows the goal is to win. But at the end of the day if you create a locker room that is just family oriented, it’s going to create a very chill, but also hardworking, environment.”
Castillo said he understood where he stood in the pecking order of free agents for the Blue Bombers, knowing that the team was fixated on first landing Dalton Schoen and Brady Oliveira and that he had to be patient.
“I think being in my ninth year already, I understand how free agency works,” he said. “Just understanding that helped me, it gave me a little bit of calm knowing that once those guys signed, then I knew I was probably next in line after they signed a couple guys.”
Castillo’s experiences in the game, his role as a father and the perspective that comes with time have also played pivotal roles in his comfort level and this peace he has found. He also twice referenced the ACL injury he suffered in 2017 while with the Tiger-Cats and the subsequent layoff – 618 days without a contract – in fostering his appreciation for everything he has today in the game.
“It’s just another part of my chapter of my book of memories that I’m creating,” he said. “And hopefully one day I can write a book. But I think it’s pretty cool that my son will be able to see all the jerseys and helmets with every team that I’ve been on. It’ll be like, ‘Hey you know what? That was my dad.’ And I don’t know if you all know, but my dad he was in and out of my life. Really not much in it. So, for me if I can set that example where, hey, my dad is educated, he’s Mexicano and he was able to achieve his dream, which is kicking a football, practising five minutes a day and the other two hours just joking around with the guys, I think that speaks volumes. So, I’m trying to show everything that I’ve learned through my experiences, through the patterns of life that it has taught me and take all that and show it to my son and my nieces and nephews, too. Because on my wife’s side there are 17 nieces and nephews, and they all look up to me in terms of, ‘Hey, you know what? He’s brown and he’s doing that, he’s on TV. Shoot, I can do it, too.’ Because let’s be honest, there’s not many Mexicanos playing football. So, for me to able to still be playing at this age, I’m 33, and with ‘Castillo’ stitched on the back of the uniform, it’s bigger than just me. It’s representing a whole culture.”
