One of the goals in softball is to return to the same home plate you started from, but Jeremy Nobles’s journey through the sport led him to a new world.

“Growing up, being around the same people, doing the same thing every day and every weekend,” Nobles says, describing his life as a 20-year-old in Moundville, Ala., population less than 2,500. “And just knowing in the back of my head that I like guys and there’s no way the people I hang around with would acknowledge or understand that. It’s hard living with that kind of secret with nobody to talk to, and trying to find myself—I just didn’t know what to do.”