HOBART, Wis. (NBC 26) — Cody Schwartz already left and returned to Northeast Wisconsin once so far on his basketball journey after finding himself homesick during his sophomore year at San Jose State University. This time around, he knows further his career will take him farther away than the west coast.
"Right now I think it's just you know, I want to see if I can keep playing basketball," Schwartz said. "You know, that's kind of my passion, my dream to keep going and see if I can make it a kind of a job and see how long I can do that for. So right now, if I want to do that, the first place that you know, I got to look is probably overseas."
His road to the professional level has not been smooth since graduating in 2020.
"I graduated and with the original plan to try and pursue my dream of going and playing overseas basketball, and then with COVID it was pretty crazy," Schwartz said. "So the first year didn't work out for me, and I was trying to gear up and get ready for this year and then the injury happened."
While playing in the spring 2021 Wisconsin Basketball League season, Schwartz ruptured his right Achilles tendon mid-game.
"Initially, I thought somebody like shoved me or some or pushed me because I backpedal sprinting and just kind of collapsed," Schwartz said. "I didn't know exactly what happened at first and then kind of once I realized there was nobody around me to push me, I realized that I was like, oh, this is probably my Achilles and knew that right away that that was the injury."
Schwartz had surgery three days later and was mentally dragging himself through the weeks with little to no mobility.
Ben Ash, one of his trainers at Synergy Sports Performance, says Achilles injuries are extremely daunting for basketball players.
"And you never think about how much a basketball player actually does have to push off, and if they have to push off suddenly, so it can just happen," Ash said. "And these are things that we do our best to prevent, but we can never plan for. We can just implement things we think are going to help prevent them. We just want to get him on the court. So we've been working on strength, speed, agility, everything like that."
Schwartz is signed to an agency based on Croatia and is hoping to be picked up by a team mid-season in early 2022.
