OAK FOREST, Ill. — The first thing Paityn Castillo noticed was her calves.
She was 14, a freshman finishing volleyball season at Oak Forest High School, about 25 miles south of Chicago, in October 2024. She was fighting what felt like a routine cold when her legs began to tighten. On a Thursday after school, she dropped her phone and couldn’t pick it up. Bending down hurt her too much. The next morning, her mother, Sandy Castillo, watched Paityn cross the room and thought of the Tin Man — stiff, mechanical, wrong.
By that Friday afternoon, her father, Reggie Castillo, had taken her to the pediatrician. She tested positive for strep throat. Within hours, she was being wheeled into a hospital.
By Sunday, she was in a wheelchair.
By Monday night, she was on a ventilator.
Guillain-Barré Syndrome — a rare autoimmune disorder often triggered by infection — was shutting her body down from the feet up. She lost the ability to walk, then swallow, then speak. Her mind stayed clear. She could hear doctors explaining her condition to her parents. She could see their faces. She just couldn’t respond.
“When you’re fully aware the whole time, it makes it harder,” said Paityn, now a sophomore and almost fully recovered, months after the ordeal at a Starbucks near her home.
She spent six weeks in the pediatric ICU and 14 more in inpatient rehabilitation at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. She was intubated for three weeks. Therapists suspended her in a ceiling harness and manually moved her legs through walking patterns. She had to relearn how to swallow. How to eat. How to dress herself.
One afternoon in February of 2025, the harness came off. Her legs trembled. A therapist hovered close enough to catch her. Paityn took a step without assistance. In August, she was back on a volleyball court. She didn’t miss a single high school game.
And Max Strus, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ $62 million small forward, was there to see her play.
Paityn Castillo (center) spent six weeks in the pediatric ICU and 14 more in inpatient rehabilitation battling Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Max Strus (in leg brace) supported Castillo and her family through his foundation. (Photo courtesy of Paityn Castillo)
You haven’t heard much this NBA season about Strus, 29, because he hasn’t played. He is still fighting his way back from offseason surgery to repair a fracture in his left foot, and after months of waiting he is nearing a return that could happen within the next week.
In the middle of last season — his second with the Cavs — Strus, along with his sister Maggie Strommer and best friend Jake Wimmer, formally launched the Max Strus Family Foundation. The foundation operates with a volunteer board, raises most of its money through camp registrations and a bowling fundraiser in Cleveland, and directs grants to youth sports programs, cancer organizations and mental health nonprofits in the cities Strus has lived in.
The foundation is small — it distributed about $160,000 in 2025 — by design. Strus wants to know the people he’s able to help.
“I don’t want to be somebody or our foundation as a whole doesn’t want to be a group that’s just like handing out money and you don’t hear from us again,” Strus said. “We want to be in it for the long run. Like we want to create relationships. We want to be impactful on people’s lives and be there as support.”
When Strus was just making his way in the NBA with the Miami Heat, his coach Erik Spoelstra’s son went through a serious health scare. Spoelstra remembers Strus knocking on his office door.
“When my son was sick, he stopped by my office,” Spoelstra said. “A lot of people just feel awkward. They don’t know what to say. He just wanted to offer support. And also said, ‘Hey, if you’re doing anything, I want to be part of it.’”
Spoelstra said the gesture didn’t surprise him.
“You can see that Max just naturally thinks about other people,” he said. “So the fact that he’s doing this kind of work is not at all surprising.”
Strus grew up watching his mother work at a YMCA. In sixth grade, he saw close friends start the Andrew Wisher Foundation after a brother died of colon cancer. Max’s sister, Maggie, is executive director of the Wisher charitable fund. The framework for what Max is building was always there. His foundation simply formalized it.
“It was kind of always my dream the whole time,” Strus said. “The more work I did with the Andrew Wisher Foundation, I realized the impact that it had on people’s lives. And I just felt that by me starting my own (foundation), it could impact more lives and touch more people.”
Max Strus played for Erik Spoelstra in Miami, and the veteran coach said he’s not surprised by Strus’ nonprofit work. “You can see that Max just naturally thinks about other people,” Spoelstra said. (Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
Paityn Castillo’s family lives in Oak Forest, Ill., a south Chicago suburb about 20 minutes from Hickory Hills — Strus’ hometown. Paityn’s father Reggie, a firefighter in suburban Chicago, was the athletic trainer at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School when Strus and Wimmer played there. Reggie taped their ankles.
When Paityn got sick, Strus’ foundation had already decided it would introduce a new annual honor at camp — the Gary Strong Award, named for Wimmer’s late father. It would go to a young person who had shown unusual resilience in the face of illness.
Around that time, Paityn’s story appeared on the local news. Members of the foundation’s board saw it. Strus said it was likely his parents who first brought her name up. Maggie contacted Reggie via social media.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” she asked him.
That summer, at Strus’ basketball camp in the Chicago suburbs — attended by Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson, Caleb Martin, Strus’ former teammate on the Heat, New Orleans Pelicans forward Herb Jones and Sacramento Kings forward Keegan Murray — Paityn and her parents stood near the front of the gym as campers gathered cross-legged on the hardwood after the final session.
“Max walks up… he dabs them up… ‘Maximus!’” Sandy Castillo said later, still smiling at the memory. “And I was like, wait — he really knows you?”
Strus called Paityn forward and introduced her as the inaugural recipient of the Gary Strong Award. She received a $10,000 check to help with medical expenses from six weeks in intensive care and months of rehabilitation.
“The bills are going to keep coming,” Sandy said. “It’s strictly set aside for medical.”
The relationship between Strus and the Castillos didn’t end there.
When Paityn returned to volleyball — something doctors once weren’t sure she would do again — Strus went to a game. Oak Forest against Stagg, Strus’ alma mater. Strus had just suffered the injury that has kept him out this season, and was home beginning his rehab. Strus walked in quietly and took a seat midway up the bleachers with Wimmer and his mother, and Strus’s mom and sister. Reggie saw Strus first.
“I thought, ‘There’s no way,’” Reggie said.
Paityn spotted him during warmups. A double take. A grin she tried to suppress. Then back to the line drill. Strus stayed for the match. He cheered, clapped, and talked with the Castillos afterward about school and how her legs felt now compared to when she first started to walk again.
No cameras. No foundation signage. Just an NBA player in a high school gym watching a 14-year-old who had once been told recovery could take years.
“He’s still just Max from Hickory Hills,” Reggie said. “We know he has a sandwich named after him at a couple of the local sub joints around here. And he’s a Miller beer sponsor. But he’s still just Max.”
Two days before Christmas in 2024, Dylan Long went in for a sports physical.
He was 15, a right-handed pitcher and third baseman from the south suburbs. Routine bloodwork showed an abnormally high white blood cell count. More tests followed. On Dec. 23, doctors told him he had Stage 2A Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Four masses in his chest.
Chemo began Jan. 6, 2025. Dylan tried to hold his routine together. Treatment on Mondays. School on Thursdays and Fridays when he could manage it.
Then came proton radiation because the largest mass sat too close to his heart. For 22 consecutive mornings, he arrived at 6:30. He was strapped down so he wouldn’t move. A molded mask secured over his face. Fifteen minutes. Then school.
One afternoon that spring, after chemo, he took the mound.
“I couldn’t imagine doing that if someone had told me I would,” Dylan said.
Last summer, on the morning of the same day Paityn received her check from the Strus foundation, Dylan Long also stood at center court at Strus’ camp and accepted a $10,000 check as a beneficiary.
The money helped with medical expenses — proton radiation is expensive even with insurance — but his mother, Gina, still circles back to something else.
“It’s not even the money,” she said. “It’s knowing that they cared.”
Strus’ sister Maggie texted on radiation days. Before a PET scan, Dylan received a video message from Boston Red Sox pitcher Liam Hendriks, himself a Hodgkin survivor, wishing him luck. The video was arranged by Strus.
“It just shows they care,” Dylan said. “It was humbling.”
Long was declared in remission in November, 18 days before his 16th birthday.
On a cold night in Chicago earlier this season, Strus, Maggie and Wimmer walked into a flat on Chicago’s west side. It had exposed ceilings and hardwood floors and pillars holding up beams around the space, and they were escorted into a small boardroom to hang out with a grant recipient and some teenage students.
The Cavs were playing the next night against the Bulls, and Strus joined them on the trip, even though he wouldn’t be able to play.
No Shame On U is a Chicago-based mental health nonprofit that operates inside public schools, running workshops for middle and high school students on anxiety, depression and how to respond when a classmate says something serious.
The Strus foundation awarded No Shame on You a grant in late 2025 after reviewing applications from Chicago-area nonprofits. The funding allowed No Shame to expand its school-based programming after receiving more than 150 workshop requests from more than 25 schools in just three months.
In 2025, the group delivered 29 workshops reaching 871 students. With the foundation’s support, it expects to reach roughly 1,700 students in the coming year and complete a Teen Mental Health Guide designed to help students and families navigate moments of crisis.
When the Cavaliers were in Chicago, Strus, his sister Maggie and Wimmer visited the organization’s flat to sit in on a youth leadership session. They sat at a roundtable with about a dozen students who help lead peer mental health efforts in their schools.
Strus asked how many students they reached. What happens when someone says they’re in crisis? How do you respond when a classmate confides something heavy?
He talked about pressure — about how being a public figure doesn’t eliminate anxiety. That playing in the NBA doesn’t erase bad days.
“They don’t just want their name on something,” executive director Wendy Singer said. “They want to understand the impact.”
Singer said the funding from Strus’ foundation would allow her to double the number of in-school workshops she holds.
After one middle-school workshop, she said, a boy waited until the room cleared and asked for an extra bracelet. His sister was struggling. He wanted to give her something.
“The goal is just to create a community for all,” Strus said.