Fans of the Stanford men’s basketball team may have spotted a couple of all-too-familiar faces in the student section this year. Towering above most of the rest of the Sixth Man Club, two of last year’s NIT-winning stars, Andrew Zimmermann ’12 and Jack Trotter ’12, have been not-so-quietly making their presence felt. Intrigued by the role reversal of athlete-turned-fan, I sat down with Zimmermann last week to learn the full story.
In an interview last year, Zimmermann explained that though he hoped to eventually study for both an M.D. and MBA, he wasn’t quite ready to give up on basketball. His plan after graduation was to head off overseas and play perhaps in Europe or Japan for a couple of seasons before returning to school.
Those plans, though, had to be put off when Zimmermann developed an injury towards the end of his junior year. He suffered cartilage tears in both hips that made training and playing progressively more painful, but he was reluctant to have an operation to fix the problem immediately.