TACOMA — Around the same time he registered to become a stem cell donor, Carson Burke received a letter from Carson Burke.
It was written in 2011, when Burke — who hails from south Seattle — was a 7-year-old at Kimball Elementary School. The school vowed to mail the letters to the students’ future selves. They arrived 11 years later, tiny time capsules, hopes and dreams and predictions printed on loose leaf paper.
By then, Burke was a third baseman at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, a living testament to what dreams can do.
“I got [the letter] my freshman year of college, opened it and it said, ‘I want to be a college baseball player,’” Burke said last month. “I was like, ‘Damn, I knew that since I was seven.’ I guess I did it.”
That’s not all he did.
On April 16, a sunny Wednesday, Burke sat in the third-base dugout at PLU while teammates trickled onto the field before practice. Blond hair billowed out of his black baseball hat. A faint mark remained on the inside of his left elbow, where an IV went in. He smiled and addressed his 7-year-old self, who knew everything.
Almost.
“He didn’t say anything about saving a life.”
Two decades before he inspired Burke to become a stem cell donor, Nolan Soete was dying.
He didn’t know it yet.
It was the summer of 2002, and Soete was a baseball player at PLU. He was also 20 and naive, enough not to recognize something was wrong. He began developing bruises all over his body, and nose bleeds that never seemed to stop. There were chest pains and sore throats. His endurance dissolved. Each breath became a battle. He attributed the symptoms to an arduous summer job.
While Soete ignored the warning signs, his body rebelled.
But baseball season extends no sympathy.
It also doesn’t wait.
“I was fortunate enough to be playing sports at the time, because that’s what motivated me to go to the doctor,” said Soete, now Burke’s coach at PLU. “I thought, ‘I’m literally not going to make the baseball team if I can’t run. I can barely walk right now.’ So I went in to the doctor, and then the second day of school I was in class at PLU, Olson Gym, and they came and got me and rushed me to the hospital.
“It was right on time, because when I got to the emergency room I went blind in my right eye. I was bleeding internally, hemorrhaging because my platelet count was so low.”
He was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a condition that occurs when bone marrow stops producing enough new blood cells to protect the body. He needed a bone-marrow transplant.
Which meant he needed a match.
Though only roughly 30% of patients find a human leukocyte (HLA) match within their family, Soete’s sister — Jacinda — proved a suitable donor. Soete dropped out of school and moved to Seattle to work with Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (now Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center). But a day before the transplant, his temperature spiked to 104 degrees. While the fever persisted, Soete said he lost 30 pounds. His body began to buckle. His procedure was postponed.
“I’d been really positive and put up a strong front up until that point,” said Soete, who endured a 104-degree fever for eight daunting days. “When that happened and I got sick, I realized … it’s close. If this happens again, I’m dead.
“That was the lowest I’d been mentally. At that point you’re just telling yourself to think positive thoughts. Because you know everything that can go wrong, absolutely.”
Because he’s telling this story, you know what went right. Soete’s temperature regulated. He received the transplant. His vision returned.
Baseball season didn’t wait, but his body bounced back.
“When I came back to college [at PLU in 2003], oh my goodness, I got sick so many times. I missed about 25 games in two years for baseball because of just being sick,” Soete said. “I was run down. I didn’t feel normal for about four or five years after the transplant.”
After playing for two more seasons at PLU, Soete joined the coaching staff in 2006. He was elevated to head coach in 2016, leading the Lutes to a Northwest Conference Tournament title in 2016 and a regular-season championship in 2018. He earned his 200th win as coach with a 12-4 trouncing of Chapman University on April 13.
He wouldn’t be here without a transplant, a donor, a team of dedicated doctors … and a baseball season that simply wouldn’t wait.
PLU athletics helped save Nolan Soete.
More can say the same.
Pacific Lutheran’s first “Get in the Game” registry drive took place in spring 2022, a joint effort by Soete and Lutes football coach Brant McAdams. PLU partnered with the Andy Talley Bone Marrow Foundation, which holds similar drives in search of donors nationwide.
In the four years since, more than 700 PLU students have registered to provide blood stem cell or bone marrow transplants to patients with life-threatening blood cancers or disorders — such as, say, a severe case of aplastic anemia.
Statistically, just 0.5% of those on the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) registry become matches within their lifetime.
But, as Kelly Burke — Carson’s mother — marveled last month: “Their percentages [at PLU] are pretty darn high.”
So far, five Pacific Lutheran athletes have completed successful transplants — football players Erik Bainter (2023), Jai Alapai (2023) and Cam Amoroso (2025), and baseball players Rowan Amann (2024) and Carson Burke (2025).
Last fall, Burke got the call.
“Obviously, being on the registry, you want it to go somewhere,” said Burke, a kinesiology major and CrossFit coach each summer who became a registered donor in 2022. “I definitely didn’t think it was going to happen, though. And if it did, it would be in 20 years.”
It was two years instead of 20. After his patient suffered a setback, the peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation was set for the first week of March. That coincided with a four-game set against Northwest Conference rival Lewis & Clark College.
Baseball season wouldn’t wait.
But its gods got to work.
“In the baseball community, we talk about baseball gods. I don’t know if you’ve heard of ’em,” Burke said with a smile. “But I’m a firm believer that if you do everything outside of baseball correctly — school, relationships, life — you’ll play better. The baseball gods will reward you out here. It felt like there was good karma going on.”
Burke agreed to miss the final game of a Sunday doubleheader to fly to Houston, where he’d donate his blood stem cells on the morning of Monday, March 3.
But first he launched three homers in as many games against Lewis & Clark.
“My first time ever in a college game was against Lewis & Clark,” said Burke, whose uncle (Bill Allen) is an assistant coach for the rival Pioneers. “And that was super cool, being on the field with him. It seems like my best series is always against Lewis & Clark, something about that series being a little more personal for me.
“Last year I played super well, and this year I played super well again.”
Somehow, “super well” seems like an undersell. Though Burke has hit just 11 homers in three seasons and 95 career games, three came in the weekend series before his procedure.
Trailing 8-7 in his final game before heading to Houston, Burke stepped to the plate in the bottom of the seventh inning, sat on a changeup … and belted a two-run blast beyond the left-field fence 370 feet away.
It was the go-ahead homer in a 10-7 win.
“My uncle was standing right there, outside the dugout, and I was making eye contact coming around second,” said a smirking Burke, who took just 20 seconds to bound around the bases.
He was in a hurry. After going 5 for 13 with three homers and eight RBI in three games (and two wins) against Lewis & Clark, Burke headed home to shower, then drove to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Carson and Kelly Burke landed in Houston at 1 a.m. Monday, then woke at 6 before the donation at 7.
“Carson is incredibly resilient in everything he does — be it school, be it baseball, just everything,” Kelly said. “He was determined he was going to do this.
“He was more exhausted physically than I have seen him in a very, very, very long time. But that really didn’t faze him. He just had the attitude of, ‘I’ve been called upon to do this, and it’s the right thing to do, and I’m going to go do it.’ ”
So that’s what he did. For five hours, Carson completed the peripheral blood stem cell donation at Cellular Life Solutions apheresis center. Burke’s blood was removed from one arm, passed through a machine that extracted stem cells and returned to his body via the opposite arm. Kelly said she was “just incredibly proud.”
Carson flew home the following morning and attended class that night. The Seattle Academy alum missed a single practice before returning to the team.
“They said to wait 24 hours before doing any real exercise,” Carson said. “I assume by exercise, they mean not to play college baseball.”
In the following months, he played plenty. The 6-foot-1, 205-pound Burke started all 36 games he appeared in this spring, slashing .267/.344/.519 with nine homers and 26 RBI. Pacific Lutheran (17-22, 9-15 in conference play) completed its 2025 season last weekend.
The Lutes won where it matters most.
“So many athletes down at PLU are part of the registry. Coach Nolan has been really, really instrumental in that,” Kelly said. “He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for leading this effort down there and really making a difference and creating the culture.
“We saw professors that were incredibly supportive of Carson, saying, ‘What time do you need to get back on your feet? Do you need extra time on assignments?’ It really is the PLU culture that’s impressive.”
Burke is the latest impressive piece of a larger legacy.
His donation left a fading mark — and a lasting lesson.
“It definitely gives perspective on how easy it can be to help and save a life,” he said. “I left here Sunday afternoon and was back on Tuesday afternoon. There’s calls and physicals you need to do, but that takes two hours out of a couple days or a month. It doesn’t take that much to make a big impact on somebody else’s life.”
That’s something his younger self never knew. Even now, he doesn’t know the identity of the patient he saved, only that the recipient was a 65-year-old male. He didn’t give to receive anything in return.
Still, patients are afforded the option to contact their donors a year after receiving stem cells.
“The further I’ve gotten from the donation,” Burke said, “the more I’m like, ‘getting a call would be pretty cool, just talking to them and seeing what they’ve done in the last year, getting back to living.’”
Carson Burke would love a call.
Or, at least, a letter.
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