From the Tennis Court to the Gridiron: Zach Targoff’s Unusual Path to College Football
10/7/2022
by: Tim Geer, Brown Athletic Communications
The path to being a collegiate student-athlete usually follows a similar path for most. Starting to play a certain sport at a young age, becoming a star on their high school’s varsity team, club/travel ball, and ultimately making a decision on where to go to school after receiving several offers has become a common theme for today’s Division I student-athletes.
For Brown’s senior wide receiver Zachary Targoff, playing a sport in college was always a foregone conclusion in his mind. At first he thought he would play baseball, then it was tennis, a sport he played competitively at the varsity level starting in eighth grade and all throughout high school. Football was not something that was on his radar while attending the Trinity School, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and for good reason; the K-12 school did not have a football program.
“I was always an athlete,” Targoff said. “I played quite a few sports until I was eight or nine. I also competed in chess too, which was a big thing for me.”
By the time he was 10 years old, baseball and tennis were his two sports of choice, playing mostly up the middle on the baseball field as a pitcher, second baseman and center fielder. When he reached his early teens, he turned his attention full-time to tennis.
“With tennis, you have to make that decision then because it’s year-round, every day,” Targoff explained. “It’s not like baseball, football or basketball where its seasonal.”
Success soon followed as he earned a spot on the school’s varsity team in doubles play as an eighth grader. By the end of his sophomore year, he was playing in USTA Tournaments, and his teams won a couple of league championships and advanced to states in doubles play twice. He knew he had a good chance to play singles during his junior year, but began to have a change of heart.
“I wanted to be part of a team and I wanted something more physical for sure,” Targoff said. “When I was playing, I wanted to let out some physical anger.”
And while that type of behavior and emotion is not normally accepted on the tennis court, he sought a solution to that on the gridiron.
“I was always going to play a college sport,” he said. “It was baseball for a while, then tennis, and after a while I was like, ‘I really don’t want to do this. I want to play football.’
“I started lifting for the first time my around my sophomore year and stopped playing in (tennis) tournaments.”
Trinity School does not sponsor a football program, which is not uncommon among many of the private schools in the area. With no experience playing the sport but determined to test it out, he began working out on his own and eventually met some trainers at a local gym who were able to put him through some field drills and put him in contact with a local team with whom he could play organized football.
That is, if you use the term “organized” loosely.
With the season behind him by the time the spring of his junior year rolled around, Targoff joined the 21-and-under New York Lions football club for the fall of his senior year.
“A lot of people thought I was crazy,” he said of others thoughts of him trying to play football, a sport that did not have much support in the area.
“It was a rec league with literally 13 guys playing tackle football,” Targoff said. “It was the only way for me to play football. In our first game of the season, I caught a slant and busted it for an 80-yard touchdown which was really exciting. We played another game and I had a few more catches and a touchdown.”
Little did he know, an incident after that game would signal the end of his time with the team.
“I got a phone call the next morning that the league was being disbanded because there was a knife fight.
“(The 21U team) was rough for sure,” Targoff said. “It was fun for me since I had never had an experience like that, so it was super eye opening, but it was definitely rough.”
Fortunately, the Lions had a 17U team as well, which was much more serious and had solid leadership, and was trying to get players recruited to prep schools.
Providing the leadership for the 17U program was a name that many Brown football fans would be familiar with. Marcus Fuller ’16 served as the Bears’ starting quarterback in 2014 and 2015, throwing for 5,151 yards in his career, which still ranks seventh on the school’s career passing list, and sits in the top 10 in several other categories.
“Marcus connected me at that time with Coach Estes. I came up here to one of the team’s camps, but nothing really came of that.”
Still unsure of where he would go to school, Targoff applied to a few schools including Princeton, but was rejected. However, College Hill was never really far from his mind, as his family history indicated.
“I definitely wanted to go to school close to home,” Targoff said. “My parents went to Brown and I have a lot of family in Boston, so geography definitely played a part in it. I definitely loved the campus when I came here. Getting in definitely helped because I only had a few schools to choose from. It’s a great place and I’ve come to absolutely love Providence.”
Now that he was accepted and knew where he wanted to go, he turned his attention back to getting on the team. In the months that had passed, the Bears has undergone a coaching change.
“When I got into Brown, I went back to Marcus and at that time he connected me with Coach Perry,” Targoff said. “I took the train up in March and met with Coach Perry, and joined the team as a walk-on. When I got to campus in the fall, not many people knew I was a walk-on.”
Not having played fully organized football carried quite a few unexpected challenges at first.
“Learning the playbook was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” Targoff said. “In those two games (with the 21U Lions), the quarterback would get in the huddle and tell us, ‘You do this, and you do that.’ It was harder than any test I ever had to study for. I never experienced true coaches screaming at you, but by the end of camp it all started clicking.”
Targoff started out on the scout team as a freshman in 2019 and has played his way into ever-increasing roles since. He appeared in one game as a freshman before grueling his way through the pandemic-canceled 2020 season. As a junior last season, he appeared in all 10 games, catching 13 passes for 152 yards, which included two receptions for 40 yards in the season opener against URI. Two weeks later, he scored his first career touchdown as part of a 29-point fourth quarter at Bryant.
“I had a lot of fun playing scout my freshman year,” Targoff said. “I didn’t know if it would work out, but I knew I didn’t want to play tennis because that is a grind. It gets lonely out there and it is a mental war. I also wanted to hit people.”
Spring ball in 2021 offered a chance to step up along with his fellow receivers, as the group managed their own subs and was a little more responsible for themselves at practice due to a positional coach transition. Targoff cites his fellow wideouts Hayes Sutton, Wes Rockett, Allan Houston III and Graham Walker, as being a very close group that has helped each other develop the last three-plus years.
“I was here day one with them,” he said. “I would say we’re very tight. They are all great guys and it’s a really tight knit group. I think especially with the receiver coach switch, it forced us to be leaders and control ourselves. It’s been a long journey and we’ve been through it all together.”
With an unconventional leadup to becoming a student-athlete at Brown, and an unexpected season cancellation due to COVID in 2020, Targoff has one big thing on his mind with his senior season now well underway.
“I’m playing and I just want to win.”
