SAN DIEGO — When talking about sports, the topics of injuries, setbacks and challenges inevitably come to the conversation’s forefront. In the last few decades, the world has witnessed some of the most remarkable career comebacks by any single athlete. Sports icons like Tiger Woods, Alex Smith and Bethany Hamilton each have stories that seem as if they were written for movie plots but are true stories that continuously inspire people.

Another story that seems to have been taken straight out of a sports fiction novel is that of the Torrey Pines High School basketball star Nick Herrmann.

Herrmann grew up playing sports, but it was not until he was five years old when he began to enjoy basketball. Noticing his growing interest, his mother decided to sign him up for a team through Master Sports, a recreational sports league based in San Diego. After struggling for a while, his teammates, who became his closest friends, helped him and one another get better. Herrmann quickly picked up the game and began to impress his family, including his grandfather. 

“My grandpa and I started to play, and that’s when I literally fell in love with it,” Herrmann said. 

After playing on his team and with his grandfather for some time, Herrmann’s skills improved exponentially. He began to “kill” people in pick-up games and his one-on-one match-ups during games. 

As his love for the game grew, Herrmann would attend local basketball tournaments to watch others play and learn from what they do on the court. One tournament he always looked forward to buying tickets to is the Holiday Classic, a nationally sanctioned high school basketball tournament played annually at Torrey Pines High School. The most recent tournament hosted 76 of the top-tier high school basketball programs in the country. Though Herrmann watched most of the games, he was most excited to see the Torrey Pines’ Falcons play. He would get there earlier to grab a seat directly behind the players’ bench so he could have a front-row seat to listen in on every team huddle. Soon after that, head coach John Olive noticed his persistence, and when he entered high school at Torrey Pines a few years later, Olive made sure he had a spot on the team.

Herrmann spent his first two years riding the bench and not playing that often, allowing the upperclassmen to shine in the spotlight. 

“I always watched and was always passionate about wanting to play and wanting to be one of the best players on the team, and [Coach Olive] took notice of that,” Herrmann said. 

Once the summer after his sophomore year rolled around, Olive decided to make Herrmann his sixth man, making him do all the “dirty work.” He would make him play defense in practice, where he learned how to dive for loose balls and take aggressive charges. Finally, Herrmann was ready to take his new skills to games, but then something no child, no person, should ever have to face happened.

While playing on an AAU basketball team in the summer of 2018, Herrmann began to notice that his legs were getting incredibly sore during and after games. At first, he did not think much of it, like anyone would, so he started to take Advil before and after games to help with the pain, but it was not helping. Towards the latter part of the season, the pain had become so unbearable he was having trouble walking. But Herrmann grinned and bore it to finish the season. He then took a month off, thinking the pain would stop, but it persisted. That is when his family thought it would be best to get his legs checked out by a doctor.

After a few X-rays, the doctor informed Hermann he had a broken fibula, the outer of the two bones between the knee and ankle. He was advised to wear a brace for the next month, not put any stress on it and rest. Still, the pain continued. Herrmann then went back to the doctor and received two MRIs.

The doctors said nothing looked wrong but that there may be something attached to the bone and pushing against it. Herrmann received a third MRI and was then told that the doctors needed to perform a biopsy on whatever it was. The results came back, and Herrmann was told he had a tumor festering in his leg that had been rotting the bone. While more than 90% of tumors are benign, Herrmann’s was not and was eventually diagnosed as osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer that begins in the cells that make up bones. While the survival rate is 70-90 percent, there was a chance he would need his leg amputated. The basketball player was told he could probably never play again. 

“I used that day as inspiration. I was determined to prove [the doctor] wrong,” Herrmann told John Maffei of The San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Herrmann began treatment immediately after the diagnosis. During his 70 day visit to the nearby Rady’s Children’s Hospital, he experienced two rounds of chemotherapy, which took a significant toll on his health and several different surgeries in which the doctors extracted six inches of his fibula, leaving behind a 42-inch scar up his left leg. To make matters worse, his mother had been admitted to the closest adult hospital while he was still a patient, to be treated for a different type of cancer. It was a dark time for the Herrmann family. Fortunately, she survived.

During one of the surgeries, the doctors had to rearrange his leg muscles and peroneal nerve, a branch of the sciatic nerve that supplies movement to the lower leg, foot, and toes. The surgeons tried their best to limit the amount of damage to it, but the tumor had already destroyed it, leaving Herrmann with a limp foot. He then began physical therapy to try and regain movement and strength in his leg, but follow-up treatments slowed down his progression. Finally, once he was free of any remaining cancer spots, he tried hard to return to everyday life and basketball.

“It was then just the road to recovery and rehab,” Herrmann said.

After going to physical therapy for a while, Herrmann had managed to wake up the nerve that had been dealt with during his surgery, and was soon able to put weight on it. A few months later, he was walking normally again. Then, he started on his next goal: getting back to basketball. 

Having to go through his journey, Herrmann was forced to take a year off of school. Fortunately, he was able to reclassify as a junior. Once school began, his relationship with Coach Olive grew much deeper through countless hours he spent with him and other coaches at practice and in the locker room, where they watched film and worked on understanding different plays. The 6-foot-2, 175-pounder knew his hard work paid off when Olive started him at point guard, wearing No. 1.  

Herrmann played well his junior season, averaging 10 points per game. As expected, he worked hard over the following summer to get better. He averaged 18.8 points, 2.6 assists, and 4.9 rebounds during his senior season, leading the Torrey Pines’ Falcons to the best high school basketball team in California. 

Herrmann has had plenty of highlights during his career, but his legacy at Torrey Pines was made during the final seconds of the 2021 Open Division CIF San Diego City Championship game when he made a buzzer-beater to beat Cathedral Catholic High School 63-60. 

“Every night in the hospital, I would always dream of taking a buzzer-beater to win the CIF Open Division, like I literally dreamt of it,” Herrmann said. “They put the ball in, and I ran as far as I could and just caught it right here and flicked it as fast as I could and made it.”

HOLLYWOOD COULDN’T WRITE A STORY BETTER THAN THIS!!

After all that he’s been through…

Nick Herrmann.

FOR.
THE.
TITLE.#TheGoldStandard pic.twitter.com/JtiFPMcyPL

— Torrey Pines Hoops (@TPHS_Basketball) June 13, 2021

The Falcons ended their season with a perfect record of 29-0.

Today, Nick Herrmann has regular check-up scans every three months to make sure no more cancer spots have started to form and, fortunately, he continues to stay healthy. Next, he plans on visiting the children’s hospital at which he spent much time, to talk to kids who are going through similar situations and making sure they know that they can defeat cancer and get back to their lives and achieve what they want to achieve. 

“My main goal for working so hard and stuff is to be able to give back to kids who are going through the same things that I went through,” Herrmann said. 

He plans to work on himself as a person while more and more people learn about his story so that he will have a platform to encourage others when they do.

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