Quinn Meinerz's resume is full of dirty jobs.

As a 15-year-old, Meinerz spent nights and weekends beneath the artificial lights in the back of the Ponderosa Steakhouse on East Sumner Street not far from his home in Hartford, Wisconsin, scrubbing dried bits of food from plates and cookware. The kind of work wasn't very fun, and being stuck indoors for most of his weekends ate at him.

His second job was better. A farm on the edge of town was looking for an extra farmhand, and he was happy enough to work outdoors and wear cutoffs. There were some not-so-fun parts, like picking rocks, but he largely enjoyed the work. The main problem was that it didn't provide enough consistent work.

Job No. 3 was outside too, thankfully. His technology and engineering teacher told him a construction company was looking for "a big, strong guy," and if he was interested, he could put them in contact. Meinerz, who was about 300 pounds in high school, felt it would be a natural fit.

"I was like, Hey, I'm a big, strong guy!" Meinerz says. "And construction stuff is outside. Let's see what it's about."

Meinerz handled mostly menial tasks — setting up tools at job sites, removing debris during demolition work and moving liquid concrete from the truck to, say, where the new patio was going in at someone's home.

The concrete work could be some of the most dangerous work, both physically and financially. If it tipped over, not only could the weight of the wheelbarrow shatter a metatarsal bone in your foot or your ankle, but there also was an informal understanding that whoever dropped it had to pay for a case of beer for the crew. In particular, that side of the high stakes sometimes encouraged some gamesmanship. Instead of leaving a few inches between the concrete and the top of the wheelbarrow, the driver once filled it to the very top, hoping to get some free beer out of it and maybe see just how strong this kid was.

"I'm trying to move this wheelbarrow through wire, rebar and all these other things," Meinerz says. "So when I went to go lift it to go move it, it just started tipping. And usually when it tips, you get out of the way, because the main thing that can happen is it'll swing down and break your ankle. … They started laughing, as it started … slowly tipping, because I was trying to stop it. They were all laughing and then I just got mad because they were laughing, and I knew what the result was if I [dropped it]. … And so I grabbed it and I managed to lift it back up. And they all just looked at me with wide eyes."

He and his dad later estimated that a construction wheelbarrow full of liquid concrete could weigh about 400 pounds.

"They said they'd never seen anybody do that," Meinerz says. "Even the truck driver. Everybody was like stunned. I pulled the wheelbarrow over and dumped it and I told them, Eff you guys for thinking I'm paying for a case of beer, and everybody started laughing."

About five years later, Meinerz has yet another dirty job. They pay is much better and the work is more challenging, but it fits him all the same. As an offensive lineman for the Broncos, he fights in the trenches, helping create even the slightest daylight for running backs and keeping pass rushers at bay for every crucial second necessary for the quarterback to survey the field.

It's the kind of work Meinerz has always wanted to do, and growing up in Hartford, Wisconsin, it's what he was made for.

"Quinn didn't grow up on a farm, but that work ethic is in our community, very strong," Meinerz's high school coach, John Redders, says. "They pride themselves on how hard they can work, and that is Quinn, 100 percent. He always wanted to better himself and better other people wherever he had a chance to do that."

That, in essence, is "the mantra of this area," Meinerz says — one that he also abides. "We pride ourselves in working very hard."

At Gib Mahr Field, where Hartford Union High School's football team plays its home games, young children often watch from the grass on the other side of the chain link fence that lies just beyond north end zone.

That's where Meinerz was when he was about 5 years old, probably thinking the same wish that most of the other children had: Man, I can't wait to play.

"That patch of grass back there, that was where all the youth football kids would show up to the varsity games and we'd play little backyard football games back there," Meinerz says. "So we would be playing football while watching this game. When you're a young kid, you can't wait to play varsity football, so that was always a fun little area. I always get nostalgia looking at that area because it was where we used to wear our little Hartford jerseys."

Meinerz played several sports growing up — baseball, soccer, track and field, wrestling among them — but football was always king, though playing offensive line wasn't his first inclination.

"I was always watching Brett Favre and that kind of stuff," Meinerz says. "I wanted to play quarterback, but my body type changed and made me into an offensive lineman. I was always overweight. If you were over a certain weight limit, you were just stuck on the offensive line. But I've grown to really love the position."

His size and talent also regularly placed him into older classes, which served him well until he finally got to high school, hoping to realize those kindergarten dreams.

"When I got into freshman year, I was expecting to move up to play on JV, but I actually got sent back down to the freshman and they said, Hey, we don't need you, we're good," Meinerz says. "And that was actually one of the first times I sat on the bench for an entire game and didn't play. That motivated me a lot. So came back the next year and was starting right tackle for the varsity football team at 6-2, 260 [pounds]. So I went from 180 to 260 [pounds] and put on three, four inches of height. … The coaches didn't even recognize who I was when I walked into the building."

Behind Meinerz — and his newfound bulk, which he and his friends affectionately called "The Gut" — and other talented linemen, Hartford Union's head football coach implemented a smashmouth style of offense that fit their team.

After his junior season, Meinerz watched the tape and wasn't happy.

He may have been a first-team selection to the Associated Press' Division III All-America team, but he thought he could have been better. His body could have been better.

Meinerz desperately wanted to make the leap to the NFL after college, and he knew there'd be little room for error.

He was impressive at this level, but to show scouts, coaches and general managers that he was as talented as players from Division I programs like Georgia, he couldn't be or even appear "sloppy."

Over the course of the first months of the offseason, he returned to the weight room, intent on proving he'd be a worthy NFL prospect.

And then sports shut down. The world shut down.

In the summer of 2020, as universities' athletics programs considered a potential return, the NCAA issued COVID-19 guidelines for protocols to conduct fall sports, which included consistent testing, among other protocols.

The Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference couldn't facilitate those protocols. Before the pandemic, Meinerz had once gone door to door selling raffle tickets to support Whitewater's athletics program. The WIAC simply didn't have the same ability as FBS conferences to provide the necessary testing framework to function.

Bullis delivered the news to his team via Zoom: There would be no 2020 season.

"That was very heart-wrenching," Bullis says. "Not a fun day to communicate that to our kids. …

"For all of our seniors, Quinn being one of them, that was [tough]. And you talk about hurdles that he's overcome, was not having a senior year of film, especially coming from D-III. The evaluation that was done for the senior combine and those types of thing was done off of junior film."

With his sights set on the NFL, Meinerz pondered an uncertain future.

Truth be told, there was one more job Meinerz held before he entered the NFL.

Technically, it wasn't employment so much as volunteering because he had no work permit in Canada at his great-uncle Tim's rustic fishing camp at an island on Hector Lake in Ontario.

Meinerz' father, Aaron, had taken him there for family trips ever since Quinn was about 12, which was the same age Aaron started going there.

It's incredibly remote, of course. Internet service is available when the generator is on, but that eats up diesel fuel, so it's not on constantly. The closest road that has been mapped on Google Street View is more than 20 miles away. During the colder months, Tim harvests ice for the camp right off the lake and stores it in a shack.

The easiest way in and out to the camp is by float plane, which lands directly on the lake. The only other way — via winding gravel logging roads — is nerve-wracking, though also incredibly beautiful. Moose, lynx, black bears — it's not uncommon to see wildlife out there. Generally, they'd only travel on it to go to town two-and-a-half hours away for supplies.

During the summer between college semesters, Meinerz spent time on Hector Lake and helped Tim operate the camp to earn his keep, and sometimes he traveled down those logging roads, white-knuckling it while constantly communicating his location and direction on radio with truckers to avoid any potential collisions.

It was grueling, of course. On those trips, he put equipment like propane tanks and other supplies in the truck. He drove the truck back to a turnoff point off the logging road and unloaded it onto an ATV, and would then drive the ATV to a boat. He would then schlepp the supplies onto the boat, which took it to the island to be unloaded once again. According to Quinn's calculations, he once lifted 60,000 pounds over a 12-hour span, touching each item four times.

This was where he filmed his famous forest workout. Working there was a workout on its own, but Meinerz also formulated a plan with the strength and conditioning coach at Whitewater. He brought the family's old weight set to the island, but he supplemented the video with more humorous elements, like coming out of his stance and pancaking a tree to the ground. (Not a live tree — "That literally would be impossible, to do that to a tree that's alive," Quinn says with a laugh.)