By Nate Mickelberg
Photos by J. Alan Paul Photography and
courtesy of Nick Schommer
Q:
a:
You went from an incredibly violent
and dangerous job to an office job. Did
you find yourself having to rethink your
identity at all?
“Oh, definitely. They talk about it all the
time, how professional athletes kind
of get lost when they’re done playing.
Because they’ve had something for so long
and it’s just gone from their life. You can kind
of imagine different parts of your life that have
been consistent for 10, 15 years and all of a
sudden you just remove that. It’s just gone.
And you can’t do anything about it. And with
basketball, baseball, you can always go play
career timeline
Nick Schommer
was a Third-team
FCS All-American
safety for the Bison
in 2008.
Drafted in the
seventh round
of the 2009 NFL
Draft, Schommer
played two and a
half seasons for the
Tennessee Titans
before injuries
forced him into an
early retirement.
17
MARKETING
A
fter injuries derailed the NFL career of former Bison football
standout Nick Schommer, he was faced with the prospect of
giving up the only thing he'd ever known. After a few years of soulsearching and figuring out what he wanted from his second career,
he's found his niche as a project and operations manager for local
software development company Hash Interactive. And while a tech
startup might seem like it's about as far away from a football field
as you can get, Schommer says he's carried many of the values he
learned from being an elite athlete into the conference room.
NEXT
What Football Taught Nick Schommer
About Succeeding in Business
PROFILE
Groomed on the Gridiron