Chesterton volleyball player/social media influencer Cesar Mendoza has Tik Tok following of 1.7 million and counting and drawing increasing number of fans to games

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

They sit in pockets of five, 10, even 15 girls and they all take out their iPhones and frame the same Chesterton volleyball player, beginning with pregame warmups. Their phones begin tracking the movements of No. 2, the guy with sparkling earrings under a thick mop of curly brown hair.
Verklempt, these young fans of Chesterton libero/defensive specialist Cesar Mendoza might or might not enjoy watching volleyball. That’s beside the point. Deeply immersed in celebrity culture, they are there to see a cyber superstar in real life.
A junior at Chesterton after spending his first two years of high school at LaPorte, Mendoza has 1.7 million Tik Tok followers and counting. At the beginning of the month, he had 1.5 million, so his fan base is growing rapidly.
Mendoza falls into the category of social media influencer, human vehicles who enable companies to eliminate the middleman in marketing products. The companies need not pay to create commercials or buy expensive airtime. They just need to find someone so popular that he or she is worth paying them to wear their products. The influencer supplies the content.
Mendoza said he wants to play volleyball in college. If he can’t find a school to give him a scholarship to play, he certainly wouldn’t have a problem handling the bill with his current earning power. Put it this way: Uncle Sam received a lot more money from Mendoza today than from the typical high school student. A lot more.
“He’s pretty famous,” senior teammate George O’Connor said. “It’s pretty cool. We get to play with a famous person. It’s nice.”
Mendoza specializes in lip sync videos, models, dances some. At last check, the most popular video had 20.5 million views.
He said he has been doing Tik Tok for “maybe three years. I started posted funny content a long time ago when I was a little kid, not really expecting to build a following. Of course, I love my fans. I love them all. It’s such a supportive thing in my life.”
He said that about a year-and-a-half ago, when his following reached “about 500K followers, I started getting really good deals, I guess I could say.”
He has kept volleyball off his Tik Tok, but as followers show up at his games in increasing numbers and post videos of him playing in the comments, the sideshow grows, through no fault of his.
At a match at Crown Point on April 3, students from the home school sat behind the Chesterton bench and cheered for Mendoza.
Five nights later, word traveled throughout the crowd that a 28-year-old woman had driven two hours for a celebrity sighting.
When discussing whether he expects Chesterton’s students to turn out in big numbers for the big rematch with Lake Central on Monday, April 21, junior libero Adam LeNeave said, “We’ve been getting good crowds this year. We get a lot bigger crowds when we go away because of Cesar. It’s hard for him because everybody asks him for pictures, and he has to be there for volleyball. He still wants to be nice and give pictures, so it’s kind of hard for him. He handles it well.”
The matches can end late at night, so he is unable to pose for pictures so as not to hold up the team’s trip back home. To try to avoid the risk of so many emotional young people crowding around the bus in the dark, the Chesterton bus moved to a different location for a safer getaway from Lake Central. Several fans spotted the bus moving and followed it to the back exit.
“I apologized to them that I couldn’t stay for pictures, but we had to get back,” Mendoza said.
The match was stopped at three different instances so that an official of the Lake Central athletic department could tell a group of young girls to stop using flashes on their cameras. He threatened to stop the match if they had to be told again. The flashes stopped. The match continued and the Trojans have such a big match coming up at home Monday, April 21, that a big crowd could show up, even if Mendoza’s fans don’t show up in huge numbers.