When Mark Zimmerman graduated in 1990, his goal was to land a job in sports.
An economics major, he was sports editor and a columnist on Concordiensis, assisted in the
College's Sports Information Office, and wrote a senior thesis on free agency
in major league baseball.
Hired by Sports News Network to
scour sports statistics for interesting tidbits to use on college football
broadcasts, persistence has taken Zimmerman from making $5 an hour in Virginia to an office on Park Avenue in New York City.
Three months after starting at the
Sports News Network, Zimmerman landed a position as a production assistant for
ESPN, where he logged games and produced highlights for SportsCenter. “It was pretty fun to be twenty-three-years-old and have the announcers read what I wrote on the show.”
Wanting to work on the Barcelona Olympics, Zimmerman took a job at NBC Sports in January of 1992. Hired to produce a three-hour highlight tape of the American athletes for NBC affiliates, he was assigned to work at the track and field venue as a production assistant when the crew
arrived in Barcelona. “That was an
incredible experience, and after the Olympics I was hired full-time to produce sports promos.”
In 1995 he was tapped to head the newly-formed online department at NBC Sports. Working closely with the National Football League, Zimmerman was the first producer of a Super Bowl cybercast, and in 1998 he was hired by the league to join NFL.com as the senior manager of programming. He oversees the editorial content of NFL.com and the NFL Internet Network,
which includes all thirty-two team sites. Dealing with players, coaches, teams, NFL Films, NFL Publishing, and third-party content providers, he describes himself as a “kind of editor-in-chief” of NFL.com.
“The most fun I ever had was during my time at NBC Sports,” he says. “I got to work on Super Bowls, the World Series, the NBA Finals, golf tournaments, the Barcelona and Atlanta Olympics … you name it. I was in my twenties and traveling all over the world, getting paid to watch sports. I was incredibly lucky.”
The opportunities at the NFL
are not to be underestimated. “In my job now I deal with a lot of players,
coaches, and team management.
Everything that I'm doing now is exactly what I wanted to do as a kid. If you just keep at it, eventually
you'll get to where you want to be.”