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By Chase Goodbread | March 9, 2019

At the time, he was 5-foot-9 and just 180 pounds.

Meinerz privately vowed that if he wasn't good enough to play for Union High's varsity offensive line the next year, it wouldn't be because he was too small. Over the offseason, a commitment to the weight room conspired with a remarkable growth spurt and a voracious appetite marked by gallon-a-day milk consumption, six-egg omelets and two of everything in the school lunch line. That confluence made Meinerz all but unrecognizable to the Union coaching staff when he reported for preseason practice as a sophomore. In less than a calendar year, he'd grown five inches and put on 80 pounds -- from 5-9, 180 to 6-2, 260.

The Gut was born.

It served him well, and with a determined commitment to exercise, he kept it in decent check -- big, but not so big as to be a detriment to his play -- until it got away from him in his junior year of college. The timing could not have been worse. The COVID-19 pandemic struck just as Meinerz had begun re-shaping his body for what was supposed to have been a triumphant senior season in 2020.

It shut down spring practice. It shut down Division-III football in the fall. And it shut down any hope Meinerz had of putting pads on to show NFL scouts his newfound fitness before the 2021 NFL Draft, until a phone call from Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy changed his trajectory as a draft prospect in a way nobody -- not even Meinerz himself -- could have possibly imagined.

Until last summer, however, Meinerz thought these efforts were preparing him for Whitewater's 2020 season. Crushed to hear on a Zoom call from Bullis that there would be no Division III football in 2020, two realities occurred to him: 1) The most recent Whitewater tape NFL scouts would see of him was from 2019, when The Gut was out of control; and 2) an all-star game would be his only realistic chance to show them a better version of himself before the draft.

One of the earliest online scouting reports on Meinerz described him as having "a sloppy midsection." Being nicknamed The Gut had never bothered him, but this was offensive.

"When you think sloppy, you think lazy, and that's not who I am at all," Meinerz said. "The adjective bothered me."

Meinerz had already lost a lot of weight when the damning scouting report first came to his attention. But it was an unnerving reminder that, absent an all-star-game invitation, he might not get a chance to make a different impression. Whitewater conducted a few practices in October, but NFL scouts weren't allowed to visit college practices due to COVID-19. Knowing this, Meinerz wasn't even sure it was smart for him to participate. Ultimately, the chance to resume full contact drove his decision to log a couple weeks of practice with no games to prepare for.

"If you get contact-traced, you lose two weeks of training, which I couldn't afford," he said. "When I found out they were practicing in helmets, I passed. I only changed my mind when they went into full pads."

Fall began giving way to winter, with no all-star opportunity in sight.

On Oct. 27, the East-West Shrine Bowl was canceled. On Nov. 13, the NFLPA Collegiate Bowl followed suit.

"When I started seeing the dominos fall, I got a little nervous," Meinerz said. "I understood why things were canceled, but it was making my chance of getting seen a lot harder."

Only the Senior Bowl, the most prestigious of the three all-star games, remained. Invitations to it are rarely extended to Division III players, as more highly regarded prospects typically fill out even the very bottom of the roster.

"As a scout, (if) you put even a seventh-round grade on a D-III guy, you're putting your reputation on the table," Nagy said. "In 18 years (as an NFL scout), the only D-III guy I ever put a draftable grade on was (Mount Union and longtime NFL wide receiver) Pierre Garcon."

With his hopes of an all-star invitation dwindling by the day, Meinerz continued training in case of a Senior Bowl miracle. He traveled to Dallas to spend three weeks at Michael Johnson Performance with private offensive line coach Duke Manyweather, who works regularly with both NFL veterans and draft prospects. Soon after, it was off to EXOS with a mindset that a pro day workout, not the Senior Bowl, was probably the only thing left for him to prepare for.

The reality was this: Had Meinerz not gone through 12 months of conditioning to regain control of The Gut, the Senior Bowl call would never have come. Nagy had seen a dominating Division III player but also an out-of-shape one when he evaluated Meinerz's tape from 2019. However, Meinerz's agent, Dallas-based Ron Slavin, had made sure Nagy was aware of his client's conditioning efforts. That culminated with a workout video Nagy received from Meinerz's November training sessions with Manyweather.

"I saw him (a basketball) and there were clips of him repping side by side with (Northwestern tackle) Rashawn Slater, so you could evaluate them together. You could see how much fitter and quicker he looked," Nagy said. "That made a difference for us. He wouldn't have received an invite based strictly off his tape. It was a dice roll because you want to invite guys based on tape. But with Quinn, we invited him based more on his workouts."

Another trait that's endeared Meinerz as a teammate is the way he treated newcomers, particularly at the high school level, where seniors' treatment of freshmen in the locker room can be demeaning at worst, dismissive at best. At Union High, seniors would lead stretch lines before practice, with freshmen typically in the rear, and Meinerz was known to run to the back of the line and high-five the youngsters as the stretch concluded. It didn't matter that they might be light years away from a varsity contribution; anytime the entire program was together, Meinerz made a point to be inclusive. When they huddled for a team breakdown, seniors would lead it from the center -- except Meinerz, who would circle the outskirts and tap freshmen on the helmet. Suffice it to say, Meinerz won't be the type of NFL veteran to order rookies around with errands.

"When I was a high school freshman, I understood how nervous you could be," Meinerz said. "I wanted to be someone that they could talk to if they needed help. Especially the way I was sent back down from the JV."

With a bold personality and unbridled team spirit, Meinerz adds a near-maniacal work ethic that never quite gets its due when one's nickname is The Gut. Whitewater strength and conditioning coach Lee Munger claims he never once saw Meinerz short-cut a workout. When NFL scouts came through Whitewater, prior to the NFL's restriction on scouting travel due to the pandemic, Munger told each one that his workouts began with players running two laps, at their own pace, around a 200-meter track that surrounds the facility. Meinerz routinely finished first -- not among linemen, but everyone.

"He knows only one gear," Munger said. "Max effort."

When last assessed by Whitewater in March 2020 in the standard testing used at the NFL Scouting Combine, Meinerz posted marks of 30 bench-press reps at 225 pounds, a 4.5-second pro-agility drill and a 7.5 clocking in the three-cone drill. Those results would have ranked fifth, second and third, respectively, among offensive linemen at the 2020 combine.

"I've coached 33 years now and been around a lot of motivated human beings," said Bullis, the Whitewater head coach. "He might be the most intrinsically motivated person I've ever known."

After a full day helping to operate the camp -- it was a volunteer job, as he couldn't get a work permit as a non-Canadian -- he'd work out to prepare himself for football season. His first summer there, he just trained with resistance bands and body-weight exercises like pushups. But his weight room numbers dipped upon his return to Whitewater, so the following summer, he hauled a barbell, weights and a bench to the camp so he could maintain more strength.

He'd sweat all day, then at night, sweat some more.

"There's no air conditioning, and the sun goes right through the cabins and heats them up like an oven," he said. "Some nights I'd jump in the lake in the middle of the night to cool off, then try to go to sleep real quick before I started sweating again. And you're constantly eating fish, which is a very lean meat, so I'd lose a lot of weight."

It's little wonder The Gut stayed more fit than fat through most of Meinerz's time at Whitewater.

As challenging as Hector Lake was, Meinerz loved the place. His father had taken him there for week-long trips throughout his childhood, and on the first of those trips, he caught a massive trout with a top-water lure, a near-impossible feat, given that trout swim 60-80 feet deep in the lake. He's looked forward to time at Hector Lake -- bugs, heat, chores, and just one hour of internet service per day be damned -- ever since.

"It was a flush to get away and get some time to yourself," Meinerz said, "reflect on who you are."

Nagy, upon evaluating practice film the week after the game, said Meinerz helped his draft status significantly.

"Tuesday (on the first day of practice), he got overextended a little bit, a little over-aggressive, and ended up on the ground a few times. But once he settled in, what stuck out is that he is a strong, strong dude," Nagy said. "When he gets his hands right, there is no pushing him. If he does play center, which I think he can do, he's going to be one of those unique centers who can get some movement for you in the run game."

Early in his final practice on Thursday, during individual drills, Meinerz struck a bag awkwardly with his right hand and fractured the metacarpal bone below his ring finger. An initial X-ray didn't indicate an injury, so Meinerz buddy-taped his ring and pinky fingers together and finished practice in the same dominant fashion he'd shown the previous two days. But when a post-practice X-ray revealed the fracture, National squad and Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores told Meinerz he wouldn't be playing in the game Saturday.

At an event where players, often at the behest of their agents, are known to withdraw from the practice week or the game due to even the mildest of injuries, Meinerz pleaded to play injured. Snapping was out of the question with a cast on his right hand, so he lobbied for action at guard. He went to the head athletic trainer, to Nagy, back to Flores again -- anyone who would listen, but Flores wouldn't budge.

Meinerz, instead, helped hand out water to teammates on the sideline during the game, even though the Senior Bowl had support staff handling that task.

"That's something we did at Whitewater," he said.

And in a deal he made with Flores if the National squad were to win, he took the field with 40 seconds left on the clock to snap two plays in the victory formation.

One way or another, he was going to finish the week.

"Quinn's willingness and absolute want-to to play in the game and continue to prove himself was refreshing and appreciated," Nagy said.

Aside from a busted hand, the week that almost never was could not have gone more perfectly. National squad defensive linemen and linebackers voted him the team's offensive lineman of the week, with a couple of them telling Nagy that Meinerz was "the strongest guy to ever lay hands on them." And when he looked up at Hancock-Whitney Stadium's jumbotron after the final practice of the week, he saw a clip of Jeremiah donning a Wisconsin-Whitewater Warhawks T-shirt from the NFL Network broadcast booth.

In the aftermath, recounting the events of the week, he nearly brings himself to tears at the good fortune, and the months of training it took just to secure his spot on Nagy's short list of replacement options. Thirteen months between meaningful football action, he not only showed no rust but emerged as a completely different player. COVID-19 wiped out his senior season, but it spared the most important week of Meinerz's life. He'll give NFL scouts another look at The Gut at Whitewater's pro day workout on Tuesday.

But the proving ground for a Division III draft prospect doesn't come in T-shirts and shorts; it came in Mobile, in January, against the only NFL-caliber competition Quinn Meinerz had ever faced.

"I answered the competition question," he said. "At this point, a pro day is just icing on the cake."

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