By the time he entered high school, Brady was six-foot-five, and his size put an abrupt end to his jumping career.

He began to focus more on throwing the shot and the discus. His junior year in high school, he finished in the top 10 in Illinois state track meets in the shotput and the disc throw, earning all-state recognition.

Brady began to think about possibly being recruited to play the sport in college, and for the academically-minded athlete, the Ivy League made sense.

He sent former Crimson throws coach Paul Turner a letter expressing his interest in the program, and when he applied to Harvard early action, he was accepted. The small-town, Midwestern boy was overjoyed.

“Nobody from where I live goes to Harvard,” he says.

But then there was football, which he also excelled at as a defensive lineman—so much so that he had full scholarship offers from Division I schools such as Northern Illinois, Miami of Ohio, and Central Michigan sitting on the table.

Though it was tough to turn down the chance to play Division I football on a free ride, he immediately called the programs and told them he was going Ivy.

“I understood there was a large difference between Northern Illinois and Harvard,” he says. “Now that I’m here, I could never understand turning this down.”

When he arrived as a freshman, he tried to do what few at Harvard have done—be a multisport athlete.

That meant that the Monday immediately following The Game, Brady was off to track practice and competed in his first meet the following week.

Despite the exhausting schedule, Brady truly enjoyed playing both sports.

He eagerly looked forward to his freshman summer, when he would be going to England for three weeks to participate in the Harvard/Yale vs. Oxford/Cambridge meet–the oldest continuous international amateur athletic event in the world.

It was an event he had been looking forward to for a while. But then, tragedy struck.

The day before his plane was set to leave, Coach Turner passed away.

“It was very difficult,” he says. “You just tried to wipe it out as much as possible. [But] our head coach had to leave England to go to his funeral...it was a constant reminder. There were lots of “cheers to Paul” chants, and we were thinking about him a lot.”