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I still see Joey Taptich the way I first saw him.
It was 2015 at a Mifflin County wrestling practice, and there was this scrawny freshman standing there, all arms and legs, the kind of kid who looked as if he had a little more growing to do before the rest of him caught up.
I walked over after practice and introduced myself. I made a habit of doing that with freshmen. If I was going to cover them for the next four years, I wanted to know who they were before the wins and losses started piling up.
Joey made an impression right away.
He was easy to like.
He wasn't the most naturally gifted wrestler in the room. He didn't have the ability that made you stop practice and stare. What he had was something coaches spend their lives looking for and can never teach.
He worked. Joey worked his butt off.
Year after year, he got better. Wrestling demanded work from him, and Joey kept giving it. He became a good teammate and a leader; someone the other wrestlers could count on.
And he became one of my favorite kids to interview.
Some high school athletes see a microphone and freeze. Joey never did. He was upbeat and comfortable, quick with an answer. Every so often, he'd joke around with me, and I'd walk away smiling.
Some athletes stay with you because of what they did. Others stay because of who they were when nobody was keeping score.
Joey was one of those.
He cared about people. He would go out of his way to help someone. He never made a show of it. That was Joey.
I knew he was going to do something with his life. I didn't know what.
None of us knows when we watch an 18-year-old leave high school. We see the wrestler or the football player. Maybe the kid in the band. We watch another student walk across the graduation stage. Then they leave, and sometimes we lose track.
Joey graduated from Mifflin County in 2018. He earned a four-year ROTC scholarship and joined Penn State's Nittany Lion Battalion.
Then came West Point.
He was accepted as a cadet in 2019 and graduated from the United States Military Academy in 2023 with a degree in chemical engineering. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army.
The scrawny kid from wrestling practice became a West Point graduate and an Army officer.
I was proud. I wasn't surprised.
Joey went on to EOD school in Florida, where he was the honor graduate of his class. He became a first lieutenant and EOD technician stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, serving as a platoon leader with the 38th EOD Company.
His work took him far beyond central Pennsylvania. He helped train EOD teams and supported Secret Service protection operations for national leaders and other dignitaries.
That sounds like the résumé of someone twice his age.
Joey was 26. That number is hard to type. Twenty-six.
He died Aug. 25, surrounded by the people who loved him, with country music playing and words of love coming from family and friends who couldn't be there.
His wife, Hannah, spent the previous seven months devoted to his care and comfort. Joey loved Hannah, and she loved him the same way.
You can spend a lifetime hoping to find that. Joey found it before he was 27.
He loved his family. His parents, Dan and Susan. His sister, Anna. His friends became family, too.
He loved wrestling and fishing, hunting and golf, cooking and gaming. He loved Blink-182, country music, the outdoors, and being around people he cared about.
Reading that made me smile. It sounded like Joey. So did the part about his sarcasm.
For all he accomplished, I keep coming back to the kid behind the résumé.
A West Point diploma tells you something about a person. So does the way he treated people before anybody knew he would ever earn one.
I lost touch with Joey after high school. That happens more than I'd like to admit.
When you cover high school sports long enough, young people pass through your life in four-year pieces. You learn their names. You watch them grow. You talk to them after wins that feel enormous and losses that feel even bigger. Then graduation comes, somebody new takes the spot in the lineup, and the seasons keep moving.
You assume there will be another chance to talk someday, that you'll run into them somewhere. You assume time is generous.
Sometimes it isn't.
I wish I had talked to Joey again. I wish I'd gotten the chance to tell him I remembered that freshman and that all those afternoons in the wrestling room had revealed something about him long before West Point ever did.
He knew how to stick with something.
Wrestling taught him that, or maybe wrestling exposed what was already there.
Either way, the kid who kept working became a man who didn't back away from hard things.
When someone dies young, it's easy to measure the life against all the years that were lost.
Joey should have had more.
More mornings with Hannah. More calls home to Dan and Susan. More time with Anna. More Army assignments. More bad jokes and fishing trips. More ordinary Tuesdays that nobody thinks to treasure until there aren't any left.
But a life can't be measured only by its length.
I keep returning to that wrestling room in 2015.
I can see him standing there again. Skinny. Lanky. Young enough that almost everything important in his life was still ahead of him.
Neither one of us knew about West Point. We didn't know about the Army or Hannah. We didn't know how far he would go, how many people he would help, or how little time he would be given to do it.
I only knew I liked the kid.
Eleven years later, I close my eyes and see him the same way.
The titles don't come first. Neither do West Point or the Army.
Joey does.
That scrawny freshman with all those arms and legs, smiling after wrestling practice.
I can see him.
And for a moment, he's still here.