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(Portland Timber/Twitter)
Julio Cascante
Jersey number: No. 18
Hometown: Puerto Limon, Costa Rica
Position: Central defender
Age: 27
Former Club: Portland Timbers
Background
(Julio Cascante S./Twitter)
From Costa Rica to Portland, Oregon, defender Julio Cascante has played in rain, sleet and snow throughout his decade-long career.
After playing with the Portland Timbers, Cascante went Verde with a $250,000 deal on Dec. 13, 2020, the same day that the club finalized five other signees.
Packing on more experience than his age reveals, Cascante began his professional career in 2011 with Costa Rican first division (Primera Division) side Orion FC in 2011. Since then, he's spent time around the Primera Division, playing for the Costa Rican National Team and traveling north to the MLS.
Cascante transferred to Austin FC after a three-year stint with the Portland Timbers, where he made 48 total appearances, scored two goals and contributed to five shutouts. The central defender was also given the Champion of the MLS is Back Tournament title in 2020.
Before the Timbers, Cascante played for Costa Rican team Deportivo Saprissa and helped the team to its 31st Primera Division title in 2017 alongside fellow Austin FC teammate Ulises Segura. Cascante made 59 appearances with Saprissa in 2017-18, including five starts in the Concacaf Champions League. Before Saprissa, Cascant spent time with Primera Division team Club CF Universidad de Costa Rica from 2013-16 after his three-season debut with Orion FC.
On the international stage, Cascante has made one appearance on the Costa Rican National team against Nicaragua in 2015. Cascante first played alongside Segura in the Costa Rica U-22 team in the 2015 World Youth Festival, and he made three more national team appearances on the U-23 Costa Rica team for the 2015 Concacaf Olympic Qualifying Tournament.
With Austin FC
Vamos que vamos 💪🏾😤@AustinFC pic.twitter.com/EpE6GR79nl
— Julio Cascante S. (@JulCascante) March 13, 2021
An experienced center back, Cascante is looking to be a contender for the other central defender position alongside likely starter Matt Besler, although young Colombian Jhohan Romana could also be in the mix.
Cascante said that Head Coach Josh Wolff believes in the technical ability of center backs, a tactic that sets him apart from other coaches and makes the team a more cohesive unit.
"A lot of coaches want to not play with the center backs, but he had a really good idea to start from the back, things that make you believe in his idea, your team, and in yourself," Cascante said. "You don't face that many coaches that want to play like him."
Cascante said that the team's first season is going to be tough because everyone brings intensity and perfectionism onto the field.
"It's going to be tough because everyone gets frustrated sometimes, but it's because everyone wants to be perfect," Cascante said. "It's kind of hard because everyone comes from a different team with different ideas, but we're getting there."
At 6'1, Cascante is one of the taller players on the team, and the 27-year old is the eighth oldest Austin FC member.
Off the pitch
MOOD in Portland...
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) September 20, 2020
After scoring a club record 6⃣ goals! 🤗 pic.twitter.com/HvklDPUcol
Cascante and his wife, Jessica, have underwent more changes than packing up and moving to Austin: the Cascantes have a four-month old son as well. Just a few months before his baby was due, the defender celebrated his first-ever goal with a special victory celebration.
In a press conference, Cascante said that the move is tougher with a newborn but ultimately worth it.
The move to Austin has been a little bit rough with a new newborn baby," Cascante said. "But me and my wife, we're really, really happy to be here. The city, the supporters, have been really, really good to us."
A native of Puerto Limon, Costa Rica's seventh-largest city, Cascante said he values the intensity at Austin FC.
"As a Hispanic coming from Costa Rica, I think the intensity is always high level here," Cascante said. "I can get used to that."
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Popular
Radhia Gleis bore the tales of Buddhafield life in her book, "The Followers," and the documentary, "Holy Hell." (Holy Hell)
Although it was Buddhafield, a movement that has been called a cult by a host of ex-followers, that brought Gleis to the Hill Country, the group's Austin presence has diminished to almost nothing. After over two decades in the group, Gleis revealed it all in her first-place PenCraft award-winning book, "The Followers, 'Holy Hell' and the Disciples of Narcissistic Leaders" in which she talks about the dangers of groupthink and the impact that spending years in the Buddhafield cult had on her.
Gleis now works as a clinical nutritionist and is working on healing through her art. (radiagleis.com)
From a "well-to-do" family in California, Gleis was learning how to make cocktails for wealthy dinner guests shortly after she learned how to walk. She grew up emotionally distant from her parents and only brother; Gleis vividly remembered being called "dopey" by her father, consistently forgotten by her mother and held at knifepoint by her brother.
Needless to say, Gleis grew up without secure connections. On top of that, she grew up in the 1960s and '70s during mass cultural upheaval, the free love movement and obsession with Eastern religions.
"There were these desires to expand your thinking, expand your consciousness as opposed to the 'Leave it to Beaver' kind of paradigm," Gleis told Austonia. "There was a rebellion, a schism in the culture."
She had become interested in the idea of nirvana when she was in high school, so when a friend told her about spirituality sessions with a beautiful woman named Malila who claimed to have experienced God directly, her interest was piqued.
Her experiences with Malila threw her into the spiritual realm. Gleis met Jaime Gomez, the would-be leader of the Buddhafield cult who went by many names, in the early 1980s through a friend of Malila's in California. Gomez, a native of Venezuela, was known to often wear only eyeliner and a speedo in his prime and when Gleis met him, he was clad only in a golden tan, skin-tight jeans and a small vest.
The Shakti scam
Gomez originally began guiding members through an independent spiritual journey but flags were raised when he began to see himself as a godlike figure. (WRA Productions LLC)
Her initiation was subtle—it started as just a group of friends who followed Gomez, a young yogi with a small but growing following, to learn techniques of "The Knowing" that he possessed. Members were initiated via "shakti," a godly transfer of power that opened your third eye. Members would "pranam," or deeply bow to show respect, to God during the first four years of Gleis' time with Gomez.
The initiation started as a relationship between the individual and their "divine birthright" through God.
"Generations were trying to get Shakti from him, they were trying to get his energy," Gleis said. "He was like, 'Whatever you experience in your initiation is between you and God, it has nothing to do with me.'"
Things started to change at the next initiation when Gomez had new members pranam to him and connect to his love, not the divine love they had come seeking.
"He would say, 'Well, Radhia, some people, not you, need a living person they can touch and see and talk to, I am just being that for them,'" Gleis said. "So he considered himself now a living deity like Jesus or Krishna or Buddha."
Although she did not support the pranam to Gomez, the shift was harrowing. While Gomez was a "skilled sociopath," Gleis said, he was also her friend and she was his close adviser; he knew all of her' hopes, dreams, fears and how to keep her around.
"If you go to Disneyland, it's a fantasy, but you're willing to forgo your disbelief for the fun, for the ride," Gleis said. "But what if you don't know it's fake? What if all your friends and all your family are in on it? And the one person that you revere the most is creating the illusion?"
It would take years for Gleis to learn Gomez was secretly taking advantage of members in the group.
The domino effect
The Buddhafield waltzed into Austin from West Hollywood in the late '90s after accusations against Gomez came out, Gleis would later learn. She found out that later that multiple members alleged that Gomez sexually abused them, and it was a pattern of his to jump ship and change his name once people started speaking out.
There were a few reasons the group chose Austin: their new home had to be in a warm climate, near a body of water, full of rich culture and jobs.
Having been in the cult for over a decade, the Austin move had triggered a need to build a life outside Buddhafield for Gleis. The connections she made outside the "family" she had made for herself led her to visit the home of an injured member of Buddhafield, where she says she was greeted by two men who told her tales of Gomez's transgressions.
Tales of Gomez attempting to hypnotize male members of the group into removing their clothes, which Gomez would deny, and his penchant for using the AIDS crisis to scare members into silence came to light. It was a feat in and of itself to tell a single soul about the things the victims had experienced, let alone make formal charges.
Among the victims was Will Allen, who released the documentary "Holy Hell," made from hours of his own original footage, in 2016 to detail his experiences.
The women in the group were untouched to Gleis' knowledge and some of the victims took years to gain the courage to speak out.
"Now it was like dominoes, it was like this was our #MeToo movement. When this guy came out, now all of a sudden, I'm getting phone calls because the rumors spread," Gleis said. "It was very heartbreaking—I started hearing all these stories of what (Gomez) had done and all the secrets that all of these men had been holding, these traumas that they had been holding in for years."
That was her line in the sand—so, at 55 years old, Gleis left Buddhafield, "alone and forsaken." And she has learned a good deal about herself since then—she works as a clinical nutritionist but left all of her friends behind, with no one to fall on but herself.
It has been 15 years since her departure—15 years to ponder how she was manipulated into that place. Gleis often compares those two decades of her life to Trumpism, where Gomez had tapped into her preconceived notions and led her to believe what she wanted to believe.
As someone who grew up not knowing love, it made sense to jump headfirst into the sense of community and protection that Buddhafield offered.
"We have to be careful when we use words like 'brainwashed.' We went willingly. Jaime didn't torture us. He didn't brainwash us," Gleis said. "All he did as a narcissist—he figured out what we were all thinking about and he became that for us. When you pranam to him, which we did, then he becomes bolder. That's what a sociopath does."
Gleis details her story of what led her in and out of Buddhafield in her book, "The Followers." Gomez and certain members who are still connected to Buddhafield have moved on to Hawai'i, but Gleis remains in Austin and is currently working on a children's novella.
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