PEOPLE WHO SHAPED TURLOCK
Before Colin Kaepernick was a 49ers quarterback, he was a Dutcher Elementary student writing to his future self. He wanted to play professional football for San Francisco or Green Bay. Years later, a reporter interviewed him at his parents’ Turlock home after the 49ers drafted him.
That childhood letter is one of the familiar parts of his local story. Less familiar are the hundred recruiting DVDs his family mailed, the baseball team that drafted him while he was playing college football, and the children’s heart camp he supported long before his anthem protest became national news.
Updated 2026.
Turlock became home through a cheese-company job
Kaepernick was born in Milwaukee on November 3, 1987, and adopted by Rick and Teresa Kaepernick. The family moved from Wisconsin to Turlock when he was four after Rick took an operations job at Hilmar Cheese Company. Turlock is his hometown by upbringing, rather than birthplace. The Journal’s pre-NFL profile traced that move and his years at Dutcher and Pitman.
The football prospect many schools thought would choose baseball
At Pitman, Kaepernick played football, basketball and baseball. His college recruitment came with a problem: football coaches were unsure that a pitcher with considerable baseball prospects would stay with their sport. His brother Kyle and sister-in-law Lindsay bought one hundred blank DVDs at Turlock’s Staples, copied his senior football highlights and mailed them to major-college programs. Nevada provided his only football scholarship offer. Chhun Sun’s reporting records the family’s effort.
The baseball possibilities were real. In 2009, the Chicago Cubs selected him in the forty-third round of the MLB draft, even though he was already Nevada’s starting quarterback. He stayed with football. The Journal reported the unusual second recruitment as it happened, rather than looking back through the lens of his later fame.
Nevada’s Athletics Hall of Fame biography records 10,098 passing yards and 4,112 rushing yards during his college career, and a 13–1 season in 2010. He became the first college player to combine 10,000 career passing yards with 4,000 rushing yards.
He chose the Turlock living room over the draft stage
For the 2011 NFL draft, Kaepernick declined an invitation to Radio City Music Hall. The invitation allowed four family guests; he wanted the people who had supported him to share the occasion. He stayed at his parents’ house and also declined television networks’ requests to bring cameras inside. The Journal’s preview captures a moment that a draft-night highlight reel would miss.
San Francisco selected him thirty-sixth overall. In the interview afterward, the childhood letter resurfaced: the elementary-school prediction and the new job finally lined up. He later led the 49ers to Super Bowl XLVII in February 2013, which Baltimore won 34–31, as the Journal’s 2026 career summary recalls.
The heart-camp connection was personal
Before adopting Colin, Rick and Teresa lost two infant sons to congenital heart defects. That family history explains his attachment to Camp Taylor, a nonprofit providing medically supervised camp experiences for children with heart disease.
The Journal’s 2016 golf-tournament account reported that Kaepernick quietly donated to the camp after his first NFL paycheck, in honor of his parents. His involvement also included visiting campers. That June, 168 golfers joined the benefit at Modesto’s Del Rio Golf and Country Club.
A separate earlier story about two campers visiting Candlestick Park recorded a detail that delighted camp founder Kimberlie Gamino: when they gave him a new handmade bracelet, he produced the first bracelet the campers had made for him from his backpack.
Returning to the hometown story
Nevada’s Hall of Fame account also records Kaepernick’s 2016 anthem protest, first sitting and then kneeling, addressing racial injustice and police brutality. His later work includes Know Your Rights Camp, which describes education and self-empowerment for Black and Brown communities as central to its mission.
His adolescence also became the subject of Colin in Black & White, the six-part 2021 drama he created with Ava DuVernay. Jaden Michael plays the young Colin; Kaepernick narrates. It presents his account of identity, race and ambition through dramatized scenes. His 2026 memoir, The Perilous Fight, likewise returns to Turlock; the publisher lists a September 15 release.
Those later first-person works revisit the years documented by local reporters before his NFL career. Together they offer the recollections of the adult Kaepernick and contemporary accounts of the student his family and coaches were helping to get noticed.
Explore more of the city’s schools and recreation in the Turlock Guide, or return to the history of Turlock and its people.
