Key West High School freshman Nicholas Talpasz is competing in the Youth Athlete of the Year Competition and has made the quarterfinals. Online voting is now taking place and votes for the local multisport athlete can be placed for $1 each at athleteoftheyear.org/2025/nicholas-9306.
The Athlete of the Year competition is a nationwide campaign to raise money and awareness for
the Why Not You Foundation and the V Foundation (Victory Over Cancer). The competition is in partnership with Sports Illustrated and 3BRAND.
The winner will be named Youth Athlete of the Year, star in a 3BRAND ad in Sports Illustrated and will win $25,000. The competition started over a month ago and Nicholas has made it to the quarterfinals.
He just started his freshman year at Key West High School and was previously at Sigsbee Charter School. The family has lived in Key West for roughly 13 years, and Nicholas was a part of the 14U Key West baseball team that made history last year, winning first place at the state level, and the first-ever team from Key West to win the Southeast Region. The team then went on to play in the Babe Ruth World Series in El Paso, Texas, where the teams came from all over the globe, including Aruba, Australia, Canada and Mexico.
Nicholas competed in a CrossFit competition in June, where he was the only teenager in a group of adult men, and finished in the top 15 of the entire group, said his father, Dave. In addition to baseball and CrossFit, he played on the Sigsbee basketball team all three years of middle school and was named the team’s MVP. Sigsbee was also one of the only schools south of Orlando that offered the sport of archery, and Nicholas made it to the state archery competition in Tallahassee. Just entering high school, he is a starter on special teams for the Conchs.
Visit athleteoftheyear.org/2025/nicholas-9306 for more information and to vote for Nicholas Talpasz.
