‘Ninja Warrior’ triple threat from Brown County
SUAMICO - If there’s strength in numbers, Suamico has some serious muscle heading into the new season of “American Ninja Warrior.”
Three Bay Port High School graduates — two of them brothers — made the cut for Season 9 of the NBC competition series that challenges athletes to tackle extreme obstacle courses for the chance to win $1 million.
“American Ninja Warrior” starts its new season Monday night. The episode featuring the Wisconsin Warriors, as they’ve branded themselves, is scheduled to air July 17.
Drew Knapp, 22, made his national TV debut last year at “Ninja Warrior’s” Indianapolis qualifiers. He was one of 30 to advance to that city’s finals before the giant rolling log knocked him out of the running.
This year, his brother Dalton Knapp, 21, and Luke Jameson Chambers, 21, also made the trip to compete in the Denver qualifiers on May 23-24. How the three fared won’t be revealed until the season airs.
Drew had been scheduled to compete during the Kansas City, Mo., qualifiers in April, but when Dalton turned 21 (the minimum age for contestants) in time to qualify, the show’s producers wanted him to run the course with his brother, moving Drew to the Denver qualifiers a month later.
The brothers’ story was shared during a backstory segment that aired last season, in which Drew talked of Dalton being diagnosed with Burkitt leukemia as a fifth-grader in 2006, and how training with him helped the younger Knapp get his strength back. Dalton has been in remission for nine years.
The Knapp brothers and Chambers, whose families’ homes are just a couple of minutes apart in Brown County, have been training together for three years, often on the homemade obstacle course in the Knapps’ backyard. For all three of them to make the show in the same season feels like they won before the competition even started.
“It’s been kind of our dream just to be on the show in itself, and then last year when Drew got on it was so cool, and now all three of us, it’s just kind of falling into place. It just feels right,” Chambers said.
Like the Knapps, Chambers grew up in an active household. But he said he got lazy when he discovered video games during middle school, and started to gain weight.
By his sophomore year in high school, when he was a lineman on the football team, he was 5 feet 8 inches tall and 250 pounds.
“It kind of just hit me one day. It was after football practice, and I was sitting there and I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ I realized in that moment this is a lifestyle I don’t want to continue,” he said.
He quit football to focus on fitness, losing 100 pounds before his junior year. He joined the cross-country and swim teams, meeting Drew on the latter.
By his sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Chambers had shifted his focus to ninja warrior training that included gymnastics, rock climbing and parkour.
“Now it’s just kind of my life. It’s what I train all week every week for,” Chambers said.
Because “American Ninja Warrior” contestants advance by completing a course in the fastest time, the Wisconsin Warriors competed against one another at the Denver qualifiers. But that’s not how they looked at it.
“We never really look at it as competing against each other. It’s just that we’re doing this competition against ourselves with each other,” Chambers said. “It’s definitely just such a good opportunity. I just hope the best for all three of us.”