FOREST LAKE, Minn. -- Jackson Christenson isn’t on the baseball team at Forest Lake Area High School, but he claims that he had a good breaking ball in his U13 league -- and he challenged Matt Wallner to hit it.

So, in Wallner’s homecoming to the very gymnasium where he claims he used to miss too many shots as a member of the basketball team, he took an easy, one-handed hack at a Wiffle ball and sent it soaring over the heads of all in attendance -- like he did so many times in a Forest Lake Rangers uniform all those years ago.

"It is pretty cool to get access to these familiar faces,” Wallner said to the crowd. “I couldn't score much in basketball, but I did my best. I had more missed shots than made ones in this gym, so that was fun.”

Clearly, basketball wasn’t Wallner’s calling, as evidenced by the Twins jersey across his broad shoulders as he returned home to Forest Lake as part of his inaugural Twins Winter Caravan -- and it’s a good thing for both the Twins and Forest Lake Area High School, which received a $2,500 check from the Twins to support youth baseball and softball programming in the district.

"Every little penny helps, as you know, especially with our youth baseball and things like that,” said school principal Jim Caldwell. “There's so much on the shoulders of parents, and any time we can get a community fund to give back to the kids, it's a great thing. It's that much less stress off our local businesses and our local parents.”

Not too far from where that red Wiffle ball landed as Wallner humbled the high school student and his breaking ball, John and Maggie Wallner watched quietly from the upper deck, still somewhat in disbelief that their middle son was back here in this city, in that uniform, having become a big leaguer.

It still hasn’t sunk in -- and they’re not sure it ever will.

“This is sort of where we thought we were capped out,” Maggie Wallner said.

“My dream was that I just wanted him to play at Schumacher Field [for Forest Lake] someday,” John Wallner added. “It's a nice little field. That was just my dream, because there's, what, 400-500 kids in a class, and it's competitive at all these schools to play varsity sports.”

Perhaps that sort of modest outlook runs in the family, because Wallner joked throughout his answers at the night stop in Duluth on Sunday that through many of his Minor League downswings, he considered searching online job postings to find another calling.

But he stuck with it -- and now, he’s penciled in as the Twins’ starting left fielder after a strong rookie showing during which he posted 2.2 WAR, per Baseball Reference, in only 76 games, and he started four of the Twins’ six playoff games.

In these halls, though, Wallner is still remembered by Caldwell -- a dean of students when Wallner attended Forest Lake Area High School -- as a student who certainly knew he was a good athlete and had many friends but always managed to stay out of trouble. Minnesota has had no shortage of kids from the home state playing for the Twins -- Louie Varland was also on this Caravan leg and Joe Mauer just went into the Hall of Fame -- but it’s been meaningful for them to have one of Forest Lake’s own reach the peak of the mountain.

“It's been a lot of fun watching Matt,” Caldwell said. “My daughter was in the school, so we got to watch him grow up. They go to the same church we go to. The coolest thing about Matt is that he's a normal hometown guy. When he comes back and he's at church, he doesn't have people all over him, because that's how much they respect him. But we know that he remembers where he came from.”

And for the parents who watched Wallner grow from the start, seeing him on Monday was particularly meaningful because at first, that gymnasium and school represented the height of their dreams -- and he’s gone well above and beyond those maroon-and-gold walls.

“Very excited to have him succeed as he has,” Maggie Wallner said. “He's gotten a lot of press he probably doesn't even know about. They follow him, for sure.”

“It's so far beyond any dreams we've ever had,” John Wallner said.