The basketball excitedly coach asks the team to do 50 pushups every training session.

All your average player does is quite rightly ask themselves "What's the *ing point, I'll never do a pushup in a real game".

The purpose of mathematics is to train your mental muscles in a very specific way. Irrespective of whether you use those particular calculations in your later life, doing mathematics generally makes you a better quantitative and formal reasoner. That's the point. And I think a lot of students who are good at mathematics intuitively get this idea. And therefore are excited about studying just math for the sake of math.