Brody Stien did not like wrestling when he started. That's important context, because he started in kindergarten. His father hadn't wrestled himself — he played football — but he had friends who had, and he thought it would be good for his son. Brody went along with it without much enthusiasm and spent the early years being, by his own assessment, not very good. He didn't quit, though. And sometime around seventh grade, something shifted.

"I started seeing more progress," he says. "I could see that I was getting a lot better. I enjoy the process." He qualified for the state tournament for the first time that seventh-grade year. That, he says, is when he started to genuinely like it. The winning helped.

Five years later, Brody is a junior at Byron High School, wrestling in the 175-pound weight class, and he holds five school records. This past season, he went 47-3 — his only losses coming to the wrestlers who finished first, second, and third at the state tournament, where Brody placed fourth. He also helped the Byron football team win a state championship. It was, by most measures, the best year of his athletic life. He's still got one year left.

The records tell the story in numbers. He holds the single-season takedown record with 184 — breaking the previous mark of 142 in his sophomore year, then breaking his own record this year. He holds the career takedown record, sitting somewhere around 370 to 380 with another season to go. He holds the single-season record for tech falls — wrestling's mercy rule, triggered when one competitor leads by 15 points — with 19 this year, surpassing the old record of 17. And he holds the career record for tech falls as well, already past the previous mark of 27. Five records. Still a junior.

Going into his senior year, two of the three wrestlers who beat him at state are graduating. The one who remains is in Brody's grade — meaning a rematch is coming. The wrestler who won the state title this year competes out of Hope Academy. Second place came from Coal City. Third from Roxana. Brody watched all three from fourth place and took careful note. "Two of them are seniors," he says. "One of them's my grade."

Football runs in a different direction entirely. Where wrestling asks for precision and endurance, football puts Brody at right guard and on the defensive line, and it requires him to be considerably heavier. He starts football season around 205 to 210 pounds, then cuts down to 175 for wrestling. The transition takes discipline. "Once I get down, I kind of just stay there," he says. Managing the weight cycle hasn't been his biggest physical challenge — a disc problem in his back from his freshman year has kept him off the deadlift permanently and requires care with squats. He doesn't complain about it. He still squats over 300 pounds. He benched 265 during football season.

The state football championship this past fall was played at Redbird Arena at Illinois State. Byron beat Tolono Unity 56-50 in a game that Brody describes as going back and forth until the end. "It didn't feel like we won it at first," he says. "But later that day, it just all kicked in." When the team bus rolled back into Byron, fire trucks had their sirens going. People lined the streets. The town came out.

Outside of sports, Brody fishes, plays pickleball, and hangs out with friends. He carries a 3.7 GPA — all A's and B's through his entire high school career. He's thinking about chiropractic care or physical therapy as a future field, drawn to the body mechanics that wrestling has made familiar. He doesn't have a college picked yet. That conversation is starting now.

What keeps him mentally steady going into a match, he says, is simple: the knowledge that he's been doing this longer than almost anyone he'll face. "I just know that I've been training for so long and probably longer than most people," he says. "I go out there and know that I've put in more work. It keeps me confident, but not too confident." He trained through years when he wasn't good at it, kept going until the work started paying off, and he still hasn't stopped. One more year to add to it.