Fullback Todd stars in academics
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BY BRIAN ROSENTHAL / Lincoln Journal Star
Dane Todd is a loyal viewer of “Grey’s Anatomy.” It’s the hot television drama about a group of medical interns working at a Seattle hospital.
“I love that show,” Todd said. “I’m a big fan of it. I don’t know why. It’s overplayed drama … but it’s entertaining to me.”
Never mind that Todd can’t name a character on the show, nor tell you who’s, uh, seeing who.
As somebody who plans on being in medical school a year from now, Todd, it seems, is more intrigued with the doctor stuff.
Yet Todd said he hasn’t ever pictured himself in the shoes of George or Izzie.
“I don’t know anything about medicine yet, and I don’t pretend like I’m something I’m not,” Todd said. “I’ve still got a long ways to go and a lot of hard work ahead of me to get to where I’d like to be.”
That’s pretty much Todd in a nutshell. Always aiming. Always working. And yes, always achieving.
Todd, a senior fullback on the Nebraska football team, is one of the nation’s top scholar-athletes. The Lincoln Southeast graduate earned 131 hours of straight A’s in receiving an undergraduate degree in biological sciences.
He’s currently a non-degree-seeking graduate student, taking anatomy and an English course. That’s not exactly ballroom dancing or basket weaving.
“I’m just taking classes to learn some more things,” Todd said. “I’m just taking them because I want to.”
Todd took his MCATs in the midst of fall football camp. He gets the results next month.
Will he pass?
Does a Nebraska fullback take blocking seriously?
“I don’t know. We’ll see,” Todd said of his test results. “I’m sure they went all right.”
Last season, Todd joined teammate Kurt Mann as an ESPN the Magazine/CoSIDA first-team Academic All-American. He’s a two-time first-team Academic All-Big 12 selection.
And come January, Todd stands a good chance to win the NCAA’s Walter Byers postgraduate scholarship. No Husker has won that award since Rob Zatechka in 1995.
Zatechka is now a doctor.
“Dane has been one of the most motivated student-athletes in the history of the Nebraska program,” said Keith Zimmer, Nebraska associate athletic director for student life.
“You could make a strong case that he’s not only one of football’s top student-athletes in the nation, but one of the top student-athletes in all of college athletics.”
Loy and Kim Todd, Dane’s parents, probably knew that could be the case when their son was in middle school.
You know the call from the school counselor so many parents dread? The call the Todds received was just the opposite.
“(The school) had done some testing at some time,” Loy Todd said, “and they said, ‘We need to challenge him some more,’ and they did.”
Loy is a lawyer. Kim is a landscape architect. There are no doctors in the family.
Why Dane’s interest?
“There was never one defining moment where I said, ‘I have to be a doctor.’ I’ve wanted to be a doctor my entire life, as far back as I can remember,” Dane Todd said. “Just everything that I’ve done has told me more and more that I should be a doctor.
“Nothing’s deterred me from it. It just seems like the right path for me.”
It’s a path Todd’s been keeping quite worn. He spent the summer meeting various doctors, visiting clinics and even watching some surgeries.
All of that was the result of some keen networking on Todd’s behalf. At the Football 101 for Women clinic last spring, Todd met a few nurses.
“I threw out a shameless plug for myself,” Todd said.
How else would Todd have witnessed, firsthand, a heart surgery?
“It was pretty wild,” Todd said of his experience. “I was close enough that they made me put on goggles because they thought I was going to get squirted with blood.”
The surgery, by the way, was successful.
“It was neat to see ... there’s a whole team of doctors in there,” Todd said. “They all know each other so well, they hardly have to say anything to one another. It just works seamlessly.”
Todd also watched a shoulder surgery and some eye surgeries.
“It takes some either really fine movements, or not quite the finest of movements,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a lot more wrenching-around going on.”
Todd said he’s applying “all over the place” for med school, including the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the Mayo Clinic and schools in Oregon, Washington and Atlanta.
Todd will go wherever he’s accepted, saying he doesn’t have a preference.
“I’m trying to keep an open mind about it, so I’m not swayed in one way or another,” said Todd, who’s not certain on what area of medicine he wants to study. “I’m just going to take it all in, decide what I’d like to do, decide what would fit best with what kind of lifestyle I’d like to live, and go from there.”
Todd’s also a four-time Brook Berringer Citizenship Team member, and three-year representative on the Nebraska Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. And not all of Todd’s hospital visits are medical-related.
“Any time I get a request where there’s a young person in the hospital, Dane, especially, likes to do that,” Zimmer said. “In fact, he’s done several of those in the past week, and he never wants any recognition for it.”
Todd, who’s engaged to be married in 2008, is in his fifth and final year of football for Nebraska. He scored his first career touchdown two weeks ago against Nicholls State.
“My brother saw my picture in the paper (the next day),” Todd said. “He said that’s the first time he’s seen me smile in five years.”
He’s barely had time. Check out this schedule from Wednesday: Up at 6:20 a.m., lift weights until 8, get treatment, study for anatomy, go to anatomy from 9:30 to 11, eat lunch, get taped and ready for football practice, work on an English paper, practice until 6:30 p.m., eat dinner, study anatomy, go to bed.
“When you’re busy all the time, you wonder if it’s worth it,” Todd said. “But when I sit down and actually think about it, it is. I wouldn’t be the same person if I didn’t do all this work and throw my all into everything.
“That’s the reason I’ve got to where I am now.”
Reach Brian Rosenthal at 473-7436 or brosenthal@journalstar.com.
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