As Daniel Megel gets ready to step in the boxing ring before practice, coach Jon Swanson calls his name and asks him to come talk to me.

Megel, junior in finance, lets out a disappointed sigh as he slowly walks over for the quick interview. But the sigh wasn’t out of disgust for the media or because he was afraid of talking.

“He’d rather be boxing. He loves to work,” Swanson says to me with a grin as Megel sulks over.

And no club boxer works at their craft like Megel does. For nearly two hours a day, six days a week, the quiet 156-pound fighter can be found at State Gym pounding away at punching bags or working on footwork, trying to improve himself as a boxer. After all, he’d never been in the ring before coming to Iowa State.

Like many high schoolers, Megel was a multi-sport athlete, playing basketball, football and running track. And like most high schoolers, he’d never been in the boxing ring.

That was until he stepped foot on Iowa State’s campus, where the appeal of a boxing class and club was too much to pass up.

“It’s a sport I’ve always respected,” Megel said. “I really like the athleticism involved in it and I had the opportunity to try it and I loved it.”

But in a sport that doesn’t have a large collegiate pool of competitors, Megel was thrown directly into the fire, battling some of the best boxers from the nation’s top programs.

In fact, his start was so rough that when he was tasked with fighting a defending national champion, Swanson had to make the judgement call whether or not to go through with it. After deciding he would be up for it, Megel’s game has steadily improved.

“He came in and wasn’t winning his fights at first and had to put him up against a national champion,” Swanson said. “A lot of guys would lose heart and quit but I knew I could put him in with somebody who might be better than him because I knew he would stick with it and just get better, and he’s done exactly that.”

Now, just days before the National Collegiate Boxing Association’s National Tournament, April 10 to 12 in Sunrise, Fla., Megel is working hard to add a national title to his list of accomplishments after winning the regional title in Ames in March.

But he won’t be the lone male boxer. He will be joined by fellow juniors Josue Avila and Luke Hahn as they will also make appearances at nationals. Avila is no stranger to the competition, qualifying for his third straight nationals tournament as one of the team’s most experienced boxers.

But even the most experienced got their start at Iowa State, as neither Avila nor Hahn had ever boxed competitively before stepping foot on campus.

“Everybody here on this team is homegrown out of this gym,” Swanson said. “They started in the class and they’ve all grown up here.”

Hahn, junior in mechanical engineering, has grown to love the sport so much since taking the class his freshman year that he planned his daunting school schedule around it just so he could compete in the biggest tournaments this year.

“It can be stressful at times,” Hahn said. “I’m not the best guy at time management … but this semester I picked fewer credits so I could do some boxing at nationals.”

And as the team prepares for the plane ride to Florida for the national tournament, the boxers make their final tweaks as they prepare for the competition. As for who they will face, they don’t know yet, but the preparation stays the same.

“There’s not a lot that changes,” Megel said. “We are just sparring with some different guys, different styles because you never know what you’re going to be up against.”