Let's say you had a son who started college in the fall of 2011. He temporarily dropped out of school after his sophomore year. He finally graduated this past week, which meant it took him six years to earn a four-year degree.
Would you be celebrating this?
If you are the Zeller family, you certainly would be. That was the unusual path that the Charlotte Hornets' Cody Zeller took to get his degree in business management, which he flew home to Indiana University to receive this past weekend.
"I made progress, slowly but steadily," Zeller said Monday in a phone interview. "I did a lot of work in hotel rooms on the road."
Zeller's dogged work ethic on the court for the Hornets translated into his schoolwork as well. He ended up finishing with a 3.5 grade-point average. He has taken online classes from Indiana ever since the Hornets drafted him No. 4 overall in 2013, usually one class at a time but sometimes doing two during the summers _ all the while working his day job as a 7-foot NBA center.
Once, Zeller wrote a paper on an 18-hour flight to China with the Hornets before a preseason game in 2015. Once he had to turn in a video for a class while in Africa for a basketball camp. He couldn't find a strong enough Wi-Fi signal to send the video in, so in that case he had to ask the professor for an extension.
"All my professors were really cooperative the whole way," Zeller said. "I think they knew I wasn't trying to pull a fast one on them."
The youngest of three basketball-playing brothers, Zeller has long been the butt of a running joke in his family.
"My two brothers, Luke and Tyler, went to business school too while they were playing," Cody Zeller said. "But they stayed in school for four years and graduated in four (Luke from Notre Dame, Tyler from North Carolina). So they were always kidding me about being the college dropout in the family. It's been several years of those kinds of jokes."
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