What a Catch!

Corey G. Mazza ’07 thought his secret was safe. He hid it well enough, the revealing photographs safely tucked away from the prying eyes of his new college classmates inside the Athlon Sports College Football Preview. Soon enough, however, Mazza’s new Varsity Football teammates would come to find out what Mazza had planned for no one at Harvard to know. Mazza, a wide receiver from Thousand Oaks, Calif., who lives in Canaday and may concentrate in Economics, is also a male model. As his teammates found out when they flipped open the football magazine and found Mazza’s hidden portfolio pictures, his rugged good looks are featured in advertising campaigns for Champion Sporting Goods and Pepsi.

“I tried to wrestle the picture away from them when they found it,” Mazza says. But now he’s resigned to his secret being out in the open.

It’s a relatively new vocation for the high school athletic superstar. Two days after an industry professional first encouraged him to model last spring, Mazza had an audition in Los Angeles and landed his first job, posing in a football advertisement for Champion. The Pepsi job followed soon after.  In high school, the football and basketball captain tried to keep his less athletic extracurricular activity secret. He told one close friend “and then everyone knew,” says Mazza.

Like his friends in California, his Harvard teammates were more than slightly surprised to discover a model in their midst. . It’s earned him the nickname “Zoolander” on the team, but no real special treatment. “The kids made some fun of Corey at skit night,” says Assistant Football Coach Dave Cecchini. “I just look at him as a football player.”

Mazza says that he is neither the quintessential football player nor the aloof model type. At home, he enjoys reading and participating in his youth group, and (weather permitting) launching water balloons at unsuspecting golfers at a nearby golf course. Additionally, he is active in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program. He plans to continue modeling in New York and Los Angeles whenever he can manage. Football, however, will take priority over flashbulbs for the time being. “I prefer football ten to one,” he says.