High school football: Hampshire's Matt Kielbasa, once bullied, now team captain

Wearing only his underwear, a 13-year-old Matt Kielbasa stepped onto the scale and under the scrutiny of his six youth football coaches.

Kielbasa’s teammates wore street clothes when they weighed in before each Hampshire Wildcats youth football game. For them, weigh-ins were meerly a formality required by the league to ensure they met the weight class standards. But each week Kielbasa teetered on the edge of exclusion, as the coaches slid the metal bracket along the scale toward the 210-pound limit.

He always did what it took to make weight. Still, the weekly weigh-ins were a miserable experience for a boy who learned to endure daily bullying for his weight.

He started each day with taunts of “Fat Matt” at the bus stop. Girls approached him with mock fear, squealing that he was going to eat him. When he walked through doorways, kids joked that he might get stuck.

Today, Kielbasa is a senior lineman on Hampshire’s football team. He’s 6-feet-3 and 300 pounds of muscle and college potential. On Friday nights, he routinely pancakes defenders, paving the way for a 3-2 Hampshire team.

The senior center is nearly impossible for defenders to take down. But, just a few years ago, words could tear him apart.

***

Sitting in the bleachers after a practice at Hampshire, the memories Kielbasa worked hard to put behind him came flooding back.

“It was an ugly point in my life,” Kielbasa said. “This really helped me out.”

He looks out onto the empty practice field. It’s just grass and a couple goal posts. But for a kid struggling to find a place where he belonged, an oblong ball became his best friend.

In school, being the biggest kid made Kielbasa a target. But when he started playing football in fourth grade, his size became an advantage.

Kielbasa’s self confidence grew with every touchdown-springing block. Instead of ridicule, Kielbasa’s teammates showered him with praise. Soon, he developed close-knit friendships with them

“Football, with the band of brothers that we have, that helped,” Kielbasa said. “They’d always cheer me up and make me feel like I’m not the fat kid.”

Kielbasa’s father, Brian, earned a scholarship to play defensive tackle at Minnesota. His son inherited his bone structure and football prowess. When he watches his second son play football on Friday nights, he sees something else – an outlet.

“On the football field, you have a way of letting loose and letting out some of the stuff that builds in you during the day. That’s how Mathew is,” Brian said. “Off the field, he’s a completely different person. He’s a gentle giant off the field. He’s the funny guy. Then on the field, he’s all business.”

***

The sport that helped change Kielbasa almost was taken away from him twice.

Before he made new friends on the youth football team, he routinely was picked last for recess football games. When he accidentally injured the other kids, his classmates told him he couldn’t play at all.

“That just kind of hit me,” Kielbasa said. “I couldn’t even play the sport I wanted to play at recess with my friends. They had to tell me to stop. And they were who I thought were my buddies at the time.”

Kielbasa had lost his game in pickup form. Then, when he was 13, he grew to almost 250 pounds, and the game almost was taken from him entirely.

He was well above the 210-pound max for the youth football heavyweight division. At practice, a coach told him that if he couldn't make weight, he shouldn't even be on the field. Some teammates laughed and jeered.

Kielbasa’s parents tried to comfort him. They told him, you're a Kielbasa. You're a football player.

Each morning, Kielbasa’s mother woke him at 6 a.m. He ran for 45 minutes on the treadmill in his garage wearing a bag suit to help him sweat off more weight.

Kielbasa started watching what he was eating. Breakfast was oatmeal and a banana. Dinners were lean chicken and salad.

Within a month, he dropped the 40 pounds necessary to stay on the team. When his grandmothers saw him, they told him was too skinny; he should put on some more weight.

“That was a major accomplishment,” Kielbasa said. “I still, to this day, tell people about how I lost that weight. It wasn’t easy. It felt like I was starving myself. But I had to do it.”

***

A tattoo runs the length of Kielbasa’s left triceps. “Matthew 5:44,” it reads in green ink.

The bible verse comes from the New Testament, during Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.

“Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you and pray for those who persecute you.”

The verse is inked onto his body and ingrained into his psyche. Although Kielbasa still feels the sting of the jeers sometimes, he has forgiven those who harassed him.

“I’ll never hurt them. I’ll never lay a hand on them. I’ll never make fun of them,” Kielbasa said. “They may have problems in their life, that's why they’re making fun of me.”

The bullying could have turned Kielbasa into a bully himself or forced him to retreat into a shell. But he turned his negative experience into motivation for good. When Kielbasa sees bullying in the halls at school, he puts an end to it. When parents in his neighborhood were worried about sending their small kids to high school, they reassured them Kielbasa would protect them.

Today, his many tatoos and bulging biceps give him a tough appearance. But he is, by his own description, a “big teddy bear.”

He picks flowers from his grandfathers’ garden and gives them to the women in his family. When his buddies from the football team come over, he feeds them the pasta sauce that he made himself.

Football has helped Kielbasa move past the struggles of his youth. But, there still are times when self-consciousness creeps in. When he goes shopping for clothes, he gets frustrated when the shirts he likes don’t fit right.

In pads, he's a force. But under the helmet and shoulder pads, the vulnerable 13-year-old standing on the scale still is there.

“I still to this day don’t like to be called fat,” Kielbasa said. “It’s just something ugly you don’t want to hear. You just feel ugly about yourself.”

***

Before this season, Hampshire coach Mike Brasile passed out ballots to each of the varsity players. Each Whip-Pur voted for two senior captains and two junior captains.

It was a democratic way to pick team leaders. But also an unnecessary one. Kielbasa was elected in a landslide.

“He’s a guy on the team that a lot of guys on the team gravitate to,” Brasile said. “He’s got a personality that’s larger than life. He likes to have a good time. He’s a guy who will joke around and crack jokes quite often. Sometimes at the wrong time. He’s always having a good time, but also putting in work.”

The kid who no one wanted on their team is now the captain.

"I got bullied, but I didn’t let that stop me," Kielbasa said. "Nothing is going to stop me in a football game. Or if some kid is bigger than me, I’m not going to let that stop me. I’m going to go as hard as I can. I know he’s not going to stop me, because I’m going to be the bigger guy in my heart."