Rookie diary: James Casey

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Tight end James Casey, drafted in the fifth round (152nd overall) this April, is a former minor league baseball player who joined the Texans as a 24-year-old rookie from Rice. He has been chronicling his rookie season with weekly diary entries for HoustonTexans.com.*

My wife's a couple of months pregnant, and I found out yesterday that our kid's going to be a boy. They've got a blood test now that you can do pretty early on in the pregnancy, and my wife found out yesterday and waited to surprise me after I came home from practice.

She had a little pink bag, so I thought it was a girl, and then inside the bag it had a football and some little boy's clothes and stuff. I'm beyond excited about having a boy. You always have big dreams about what your kid's going to grow up and be like and all that stuff. But most importantly, I just want my wife to have a healthy pregnancy and for us to have a healthy baby.

I've realized that there are a lot of players on the team and a lot of people on the Texans' staff whose wives are pregnant, so there must be something in the water here. Joel Dreessen, his wife is pregnant and is about to have a kid, so it's nice to have someone to talk to about it who's going through the same stuff. Hopefully one day, if I stick around a long time with the Texans, my kid will have a lot of friends to play around with with all of the people associated with the team who are pregnant now.

Kevin Walter just had a newborn this week. I'm sure that's really exciting for him, so congratulations to him. And Kevin Cooper, our public relations director, just had a baby, too. So congratulations to those two guys.

My wife has been getting involved with the Lady Texans, a group of players' wives and girlfriends and fiancés who do things for the community. She's really enjoying getting to do some of that stuff. They have an event today with the Lady Texans at the H-E-B in Sugar Land, a food drive that's benefitting the Houston Food Bank. I'm really proud of her for doing stuff like that and helping out in the community.

She also got to experience being on the radio to promote the food drive. She went on 1560 The Game on a radio show that I go on every other week to talk about football, so she got to see a little bit of what I do in terms of the media. It was fun to see her on there and see how excited she was about doing that.

As far as football, it feels good to be out there contributing and getting quite a bit of snaps and a couple of catches, but it's hard to really enjoy anything when you're losing like we are. I know the fans are frustrated, and of course us as players, we're extremely frustrated, too. We know how good we are and we know what we're capable of, and we're falling short in these games lately. It hurts because we've got everybody in the building that can get the job done and we're right there with every team.

But at the same time, our season's not over. We're 5-6. We've got five games left, and anything's possible. Our back's against the wall, and the only thing I know how to do when your back's against the wall is to come out swinging and be relentless, give it everything you've got and leave it all on the field.

I've found out very quickly this league's about winning or losing. Nothing else matters, no matter what your stats are, nothing like that – just winning or losing. No matter how pretty the game is, ugly the game is, if your offense does really well, if your defense does really well, if it's a high-scoring game or a low-scoring game, it doesn't matter just as long as you win the game. We get to go to Jacksonville this week to try to redeem ourselves and get ourselves back on track.

It'll be nice to visit with my friend Jarett Dillard from Rice again in Jacksonville. Unfortunately, he's on IR because he broke his ankle a couple of games ago so he's not going to be playing, but I still get to hang out with him for a little bit and get to say hello to him.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Colts game. I know it was a frustrating loss for us, but thanks for coming to cheer us on. I'm going to keep working as hard as I can to try to help this team and hopefully help to make this city proud of the Texans. We're not giving up. We're going to keep going out there and battling. Thanks again for reading this, and thanks to everyone for your support.