Mason Rocca of Evanston had to make up his mind. Should he go to Harvard, Pennsylvania or Princeton?
Hard to make a bad choice among those three. But he finally picked Princeton because it offered big-time basketball, which he considers just as important as engineering.
“It had the best mix of basketball and what I wanted academically,” said Rocca, a sophomore backup center for the 11th-ranked Tigers. “Basketball is really important to me. When you’re doing it every day, it’s hard to say it takes a back seat to anything.”
At 6-foot-7-inches and 210 pounds, Rocca doesn’t fit the physical description of a Division I center. But he’s a nice fit at a school whose scheme often pulls the big man out to the top of the key. Rocca, who is being groomed to replace star center Steve Goodrich, averages 2.5 points and 2.1 rebounds in about eight minutes a game.
The Tiger center has to be able to pass in two high-pressure arenas–the basketball court and the classroom, where he carries a 3.5 average. Rocca, a soft-spoken Evanston Township High School graduate, has learned that the demands of elite academics and big-time hoops often collide.
One day last week, Rocca was the last man on the floor for a late-afternoon workout. He had rushed over after completing his last final exam, a three-hour grinder in engineering. Rocca airballed his first two warmup jumpers but was plainly thrilled to be out of school for the weekend.
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“I hadn’t played basketball in a week,” he said. “I was dying. But I was so happy to have a basketball in my hand instead of a pencil.”