“You better lose yourself in the music, the moment/You own it, you better never let it go.” This is the sound of Eminem playing in Kyle Tomko’s iPhone while he bench presses 275 pounds. 

He is focused. He is ready to go on the football field and leave nothing behind. 

Joe Brandt enters a big room with yellow walls and a purple floor. 

The first thing you see in the room are the words: “We want national champs. We want scholar athletes.” 

The second thing you see in the room are the bold capitalized letters of: Passion, Pride, Honor and Family. 

Brandt is standing there; he hi-fives his opponent and starts wrestling.  His eyes are on his adversary like a lion stares his prey. 

Madeline Legerski is in the fourth lane in the Rec Center’s swimming pool. 

She is thinking about how her stroke looks, how her kick looks. She wonders if she is doing it right. She needs to maintain her stroke and keep everything relaxed,  but go very fast.  

Three athletes. Three passions. Three decisions to keep playing, competing. But why?

Why does a football player get from performing in front of hundreds of spectators, those people watching the game, cheering for their sons, their boyfriends, their friends? 

What drives the athlete who stands on the podium, raising his trophy? Is that drive also behind the athlete who lost the opportunity to go to nationals because he jumped before the starting gun?  

For fans, there is entertainment. For parents, it’s one more way to support their child. But for the athletes, their sport, is so many instances, has become a part of themselves. Sport hides the tears of joy and sadness, it hides wins and losses, it hides the bitter sweet flavor that life has.

It is hard to say if an athlete chooses their sport or the sport chooses them. It doesn’t matter why an athlete ends up playing a particular sport. Sometimes the answer is as simple as it felt good, it felt right. But when you are 5 or 7 years old, you cannot imagine what you are getting yourself into.

Legerski started swimming when she was 12 years old. Before that, she tried volleyball and gymnastics, but none of them seemed right for her. But she just loved being in the water. Swimming called her name.

Brandt has been wrestling since he was 6 years old. Now he is 21. In high school he did conditioning in the morning and practice at night. That was six hours of work every single day. Do the math until the end of his senior year, and Brandt practiced for about 1,440 hours.

Tomko started playing football when he was 7 years old. For Tomko football was just a hobby, something fun to do with his friends. But when he entered high school, football became everything to him.

“When I was younger it was more fun, everybody was having a good time, and then in high school and college, it became much more serious,” said Tomko, “It’s more like a business. In college, it is all about business. If you don’t win, it’s not fun.”

But why? Why does Brandt put so much time and effort into his sport? Why does Tomko keep going to practice every day? Why have all these athletes been playing their sports for nearly their entire life?

“I just don’t want to give up,” Tomko said. “I don’t want be a quitter.” 

“It’s just a part of your life,” Brandt said. “As you breath, I wrestle. Nobody knows why you do it. You just do it.” 

Sports hide an internal and external fight.  

Brandt has been an All-American three times and expects more success. But his entire career has not been like this. He knows better than anyone else that the hardest opponent an athlete faces is himself.

“If you don’t know you can hit somebody in your head before you go out there you are going to lose, as simple as that,” Brandt said.

For Brandt, wrestling is much more than a sport. For him, wrestling is where he exhibits perseverance, hard work and determination. 

“It is definitely going to affect all my life because it has toughened my work ethics,” he said. “You are putting so much work for one little thing It just teaches you to be persistent. You just have to be a super hard worker, which is going to translate into your everyday life.”

For Tomko, football is a way of life, one he has, in many ways, chosen for his father.

“I want to give it back to my dad because he didn’t have the chance of play in college, play the next level, so I wanted to play through his shoes, just to make him happy, I just play for him,” said Tomko.

But when it is 5 in the morning and the only thing he wants is to stay bed an extra hour, that’s when he asks himself why he keeps going.

“At the end of the day I will just show up the next day,” Tomko said.

Even Brandt, who claims that he breaths wrestling, has asked himself that question, the one that every single athlete has asked themselves: why am I still doing this?

“Sometimes I wake up in the morning and you are hurting  and you say, ‘man, why you do this,’ but I sit down and think to myself and I picture myself at the top of the national podium next year, so that’s what keeps me going,” Brandt said.

Not every single athlete will be in their sport’s Hall of Fame, and not all athletes are going to be national champions, but if you look a little further, every athlete is a champion. 

They have the opportunity every single day to quit, but they don’t. 

They have tasted failure more than once, but many of them succeeded, and they want that again, and again, and again.  

That, ultimately, is why they don’t quit.