Junior Dallin Simpson wasn’t supposed to live until his teenage years.

Now, you can find him every Saturday on the rugby field, sprinting, tackling, and battling for wins.

His lymphoblastic leukemia with a chromosome rearrangement had a survival rate under 50% when Simpson was diagnosed at seven years old. He fought the cancer for three years, was marked cancer-free at 10, and has remained so since.

But he’s always been an athlete. Even when in the hospital, you could find him playing football, with a little ball and a helmet—connected to his chemotherapy pole.

“When I was in the hospital, I was just trying to have fun, because it was really boring to be in there,” Simpson said. “[But] there was always this scaredness.”

During that time, he took long spells away from school and rarely saw his friends. But his family, including his mother, Jessica Carmer, was there to help him fight. They would rotate in and out of the hospital to keep him company.

“He is one of the most resilient kids I’ve ever met,” Carmer said. “Not a lot of kids have gone through what he’s gone through…It was very much a very rare thing for him to have to do that much chemo, and to be in the hospital that much.”

She described his time in the hospital as one of the most stressful times of the family’s life, as they were raising his baby sister Lucie, his other younger sister Soleil, and his older brother Jeremiah.

“I was managing three other kids, and I was really stressed. I just had moved to Denver and I was trying to find a job,” Carmer said.

When Simpson finally beat his cancer, the whole family felt a release of joy, a weight lifted after years of pain.

“I don’t know how to describe [the feeling], it’s just relief,” Carmer said.

Now, a decade later, Simpson has built his lifestyle around athletics. He’s played football, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, and, arguably the most brutal of them all, rugby. Most kids won’t gravitate towards rugby; it’s a very common sport worldwide, but football far overshadows it here in the U.S. But Simpson likes some specific aspects of it.

“The team aspect of it. If one person’s lacking on the team, then the entire team is going to suffer,” he said. “[And] I feel like rugby is more accepting to new people.”

In rugby, teams try to score “tries” on drives that are like football, but more continuous, with few stoppages. Simpson loves it because of the intense physicality of the game: the hard hits, the fast pace, the chaos.

“I love watching him play,” Carmer said. “He’s such a good teammate. He’s so supportive of everybody else on the team, but also he’s willing to just work hard.”

As a kid who grew up playing football, Simpson admits he hasn’t even learned all the rules of rugby yet, but he knows enough to have fun and work hard to support his teammates on the field. He plays for the Glendale Rugby Club, made of players from many schools across the metro area.

“He’s always pushing us, he always gets back to the drills, and he’s always asking if everyone’s okay. And I keep noticing that,” North High School senior Ian McLean Fink said. “He could definitely be counted [as team captain] next year.”

The resilience he needed to beat cancer as a kid shows through now, on the field, where he has to play through bruises and tackles.

“In the last couple games, he’s had a couple injuries strung together, but he’s always on the bench, giving guys pointers, lifting them up, telling them ‘good job’ when they come off the field,” North High School rugby head coach Nick Ball said. “He’s always encouraging the guys on the field, he’s really talkative.”

Simpson says his battle against cancer changed him and his character. Carmer says the biggest way it did was his positivity and outlook on daily life.

“He’s just joyful. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He is tough,” Carmer said. “I am just really proud of him for how hard he’s worked.”