Before landing his reporting job in Russia, Evans spent much of his childhood in Princeton.

His parents emigrated from the Soviet Union in the late seventies, then settled in the central Jersey suburb where Evan would discover his love for writing and become captain of his high school soccer team.

But the Gershkovich's never forgot their roots, keeping their native Russian as their primary language at home, which gave us an early aspirations to visit his parents homeland and explain the country and culture to an English speaking audience.

Ted Goldberg reports.

Before Evan Gershkovich made international headlines.

He was a Princeton kid.

Very, very curious from early age.

Have questions about everything.

So he just has this need to desire to to to learn deeper.

Always, really at his best when the pressure was greatest.

I would challenge you today to find somebody to say something bad about him.

Rashone Johnson can't .

He was Evan's Phys Ed teacher at Princeton High School and is now the assistant principal.

Even back then, he wasn't in the assistant principal's office.

He remembers Evan as a selfless standout on the school soccer team.

He was a guy that was down for the calls with his with his team.

He will put his body and everything on the line.

It didn't take long to figure out how special he was.

Wayne Sutcliffe coached Evan for all four of his seasons on varsity.

We got to know him very, very well.

Over over four years, he spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with him.

During that time.

Evan made a lasting impression on the pitch.

Very calm player on the ball, very committed, very high soccer IQ.

When you look around the team room, Evan makes several appearances in pictures.

His teams won three straight county titles and a state championship.

You can see his self-deprecating sense of humor in this signature, where he sarcastically calls himself a track star.

Wasn't the fastest guy, but he didn't need to be.

Coach Sutcliffe says there were other attributes to Evan sort of help him in his journalism career.

His ability to see things was better than most.

He was kind of like still the hardest working guy on the team.

As if in every training session he was trying to make the team, you could really rely on him.

A lot of times we do athletics it like it doesn't just give you character, it reveals the character that you are so like that.

That person that like Evan was on the soccer field, but his teammates, like that's that's who he is.

This year's team honored Evan in multiple ways.

The Wall Street Journal provided these I stand with Evan shirts for the team to wear during some pre-game warm ups and as undershirts and this free Evan Banner was on display for each game.

Players also sent Evan handwritten letters.

I want him to know they're like, We're thinking of him and he's like a legend here at PHS.

Nick Matese, like Evan before him, was a senior captain.

This past season.

We had like, a bigger cause this year.

Like, we know, like talking in the team room.

Like, if we were in the first practice, like all of us were seniors, we wanted to, like, make a stand.

The Little Tigers also honored Evan with inspired play and another state title, their first outright championship since Evan played here.

It touches your heart.

It's something that you wish you could do something about every day, and it's emotional.

I have to say it's emotional.

You know, he was he was a very special player here.

When Evan wasn't playing sports in high school, he was writing about them for the tower, the student paper at Chess.

A decade later, the tower was writing about him.

It was basically national news at the time.

And like Biden had talked about it and I was like, It's really interesting that he has this connection to our school.

Princeton senior Jessica Chen was the editor in chief last year when the Tower wrote two pieces about Evan's detainment in Russia.

When we see things online or like in the news, sometimes you're kind of like removed from it than like talking to an actual person makes it seem really real.

She credits these stories for helping to spread the word about Evan's story.

I'm pretty sure when our first piece came out, like not that many people in the school were actually aware of him, like being detained in Russia.

As Evan's case drags on, people in his hometown hope for the best.

The paper he cares about, like the alumni that, like, wrote for it.

And we care about his story.

I'm just hoping that I can talk to him sooner than later.

Just just like all of us.

Evan's childhood home no longer stands, and his family no longer lives here.

But his mark on Princeton isn't disappearing any time soon.

In Princeton, I'm Ted Goldberg, NJ Spotlight News.