Factory Made! Volume 7 | Page 29

Before Brett picked up that lacrosse stick and started hammering the wall, he followed in the footsteps of so many other Ohio boys by playing a little game called football. “I’ve always been a football guy and still am to this day, it’s hard growing up there and not be one.” A stand out football and lacrosse player at an early age and into high school, I asked him if he played and other sport. “I played basketball my whole life, I played on traveling teams and absolutely love basketball. When I got to high school I played in intermural leagues but didn’t try out for the school team because I didn’t think I’d have the time to play because of football and lacrosse.” “Looking back I wished I would have played for my high school team because basketball translates so well to lacrosse.”

As we talked I could see the excitement come to his face when he steered the conversation back to football. ‘Football is everything to me, it’s where I learned my love for sport. I had so much fun, even the discipline of football was fun for me, there was no other sport that I felt I could take over the same way that I did in football.”

When he started playing lacrosse in 7th grade, he found a team in Upper Arlington that was very unique. “I came from a system in Upper Arlington where we were a team in Ohio that was ranked in the top 10 a couple of times and at that time that was unheard of.” He said. “I think from 7th grade until my senior year

in high school we probably lost 5 games of lacrosse. Our practices were 5 times harder than games, we would beat teams by 15 goals repeatedly, and that was when we were running our offense and not pouring it on. The team was an anomaly and because of that we learned the culture of winning and that’s a real thing.