Teacher Chris Millsback is tall, broad-shouldered and has an uncanny resemblance to the superhero Mr. Incredible. His physique isn’t a typical math teacher’s but more an athlete’s slightly past his prime.

Millsback was, in fact, an athlete and played football and baseball all four years at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

Teachers Brooke Wells and Tory Nicholson also had impressive athletic careers in college, both boasting awards and records.

Wells played lacrosse for Haverford College, where he set and held the face off record until 2006. (In lacrosse, a face-off begins each quarter and restarts the game after a goal. It involves two players who compete for the ball in the middle of the field.) Wells was 89 for 171 in faceoff wins.

Nicholson was a swimmer and water polo player for Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. She swam the mile, the 400IM (100 meters of each swimming style), the 500-meter freestyle, and the 200-meter butterfly and was an All-American swimmer in ’97. The teachers’ careers as college athletes kept them more than just in shape. Athletics taught them discipline, organization, and focus.

“Playing a sport teaches you how to be competitive. It teaches you how to be respectful and disciplined, mentally and physically tough,” Millsback, who played defensive tackle and shortstop, said he prefers football to baseball because of the team aspect of the game.

“You have to rely on the rest of the guys on the field,” he said recalling a time that Wesleyan beat archrival Williams in football after a 10-year losing streak. “It was unbelievable,” Millsback said with a smile.

Millsback said that he never suffered academically because of his athletic commitment, unlike many college athletes and conversely found that sports helped him stay organized and allowed him to stick to a schedule. He practiced two hours a day for both sports plus team meetings and game film review.

“The most challenging thing,” Millsback said, “was handling the physical exhaustion.”

Millsback doesn’t play organized sports any more but says that the lessons learned from playing have stayed with him into adulthood. He coaches the high-school baseball team and the middle-school flag-football team.

Wells was of the same mindset. “Sports are very positive. They teach you discipline, and you do much better academically. You can’t waste any time, so you stay focused,” he said.

Wells describes lacrosse as soccer with contact.

“It’s the perfect sport, but you need to stay in really good shape,” he said. He was required to run two miles in under 12 minutes and had to bench press his own weight 10 times.

In order to stay in such good shape, Wells and the rest of the lacrosse team committed a lot of time to weight training and running, leaving little time for school. He would run 3-6 miles every morning. After that he would practice from 4-6 p.m. During his freshman year at Haverford, Wells weighed 185 pounds, and during his senior year he weighed 205 pounds.

In Wells’s mind, the big games his team lost stuck out more than those they won. He recalls playing Denison University and bouncing the game’s winning shot off the post.

“I think about that shot at least once a week,” Wells said jokingly.

Playing in college is much different from playing in high school. Wells, who was an All-State lacrosse player coming out of high school, was really happy if he got 1-2 shots in a college game.

“Everyone is faster and better,” said Wells, who noted that he was only playing Div. III. He said he had the oppurtunity to play for Duke University but chose instead to focus on academics and went to Haverford.

In Haverford history, Wells is 19th in ground balls, 8th in ground balls per game, and 2nd in face-off win percentage.

But neither Millsback nor Wells seems to have the obsession with physical activity of Nicholson.

“I swim because I love it,” said Nicholson. She said she loves the sport so much that she can’t stand coaching other swimmers who are not at least as dedicated to the sport as she is.

For Nicholson, swimming was a social experience as well as a physical work-out. All of Nicholson’s friends during college were swimmers.

“We hung out together and still e-mail each other. We still get together and go to some of the bigger meets,” she said.

During college Nicholson learned to rely on swimming and working out as a way to relieve stress, and she still does today. She runs every other day about 15 miles a week.

“I get into a zone and I forget everything else, all of my worries and all of my stress,” she said, explaining why it was worth it to dedicate five hours of her daily college life to a sport.

She would swim for four hours and then lift weights for an hour but said that it wasn’t hard to balance her schoolwork with swimming because it kept her focused.

“I could talk for hours about swimming,” Nicholson said, recalling hundreds of memories both happy and sad.

However, she particularly remembers a time that Williams swept first, second and third place in the New Englands meet in the 400 IM, an event that Nicholson could swim in four minutes and forty seconds. Nicholson placed third and joined her other two teammates on the podium for the awards ceremony.

Nicholson’s hard work and focus showed as she swam a four minute and fifty-nine second 500 free style, a two minute and nine second 200 butterfly and a mile in around 16 minutes.

Nicholson still swims today but only to stay in shape. She no longer competes, although she has swum with masters teams and has coached swimming in the past.

When asked why they played sports, none of the three teachers gave a better, though slightly cliché, response than Millsback. “For the love of the game.”