What do you do at a horse show?

Well, if you are Carson Akins, you play catch. But only because there wasn't enough room to swing a bat.

Carson Akins has never been interested in horses, but his older sister is on the NIU equestrian team.

"Not me. I don’t know why. It just wasn’t me,” Akins said. “I was always a baseball player. We would go to horse shows, and I would just play catch with my dad all the time.”

“He wanted to play baseball nonstop,” his dad, Bill Akins, said. “Even at home on the farm. ‘Do you want to go ride the four-wheeler?’ No, it was, ‘Let’s pitch.’ He was always about baseball.

“All summer long, it was, ‘Go throw me pitches.’ And all winter, too. It was a lot of throwing pitches to the kid. Every spare time we had. Even at horse shows, we’d play catch and scare all the horses. We tried to stay out of the way, but some of them still got spooked.”

Akins fell in love with baseball at age 2.

“I picked up a bat and started swinging it and had a great time,” said Akins, a junior All-State center fielder for NUIC North champion Forreston (24-5).

His dad was a guard on Forreston’s first boys basketball team to reach state, making four steals in a supersectional upset of undefeated Sandwich. Bill Akins gently steered his son toward basketball, to no avail.

“I tried basketball, because that’s what he liked, and we would have fun doing it,” Carson said. “But I got him to play baseball way more than basketball. We would play basketball in the driveway and then go in the front yard and play baseball.”

Akins enjoyed pitching when he was younger. “But since 7th grade, it’s been all hitting from there on. That’s what I was a fan of.”

He is a standout center fielder, but it’s his sweet, left-handed swing that makes him great.

“When the ball comes off his bat, you can tell he is a college-level hitter,” Forreston coach Mike McClellan said. “He is still working on covering the outside corner, but if you throw him something down the middle, you are going to be chasing it.

“He has such a smooth swing. And he is a student of the game. A lot of kids like to take extra hitting, but he will hit 100 balls off the batting tee. He does the type of work the guys at the next level do to create a good swing path.”

Akins hit .459 with 32 RBIs and a 1.246 OPS as a sophomore. His teammates consider him a .500 hitter, with shortstop Kendall Erdmann and right fielder Daniel Koehl both saying it’s a “coin flip” when Akins is at bat.

“It’s a sight to see when he’s up at the plate,” Koehl said.

Akins is hitting .417 this year with a .583 on-base percentage, 45 runs scored, and 25 RBIs in 29 games.

He has always been hitting. From the very start. He looked good at age 2.

“When he first picked up a bat, he started swinging left-handed. My wife said, ‘Isn’t he swinging on the wrong side?’ Nope. It was perfect. He’s a left-handed batter.”

And a baseball player now. Only baseball. His basketball days are done.

“I played both sports until I hit high school,” Carson Akins said. “Dad said you can do what you want now. I took that and I ran.”

And threw. And hit. And tried not to spook the horses.