Medical Student Karlo Kovacic Finds Salvation in Basketball

Karlo Kovacic was a teenager in 1991 when violence began in Croatia and other Yugoslavian republics that declared their independence from the country's socialist regime. The war would continue for six years.

 

"During the evening news, my mom would cover my face if they showed pictures of massacres," he says. "There was a lot of talk about peace treaties, but no one really cared because they didn't mean anything. It was either the war was going to stop or not. When it didn't, we learned to live with it."

 

As gunfire ricocheted throughout many Croatian neighborhoods, Kovacic, a second-year student at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, used basketball to forget about the civil unrest.

 

But balancing sports and high school studies was a difficult task.

 

"I had to take 14 or 15 courses throughout the year, including Latin, German, English, physics, computer science, geography, logic and philosophy," he says. "If you failed one class, you had to repeat the whole year."

 

The ongoing war was a continuing distraction when it came to his schooling, says Kovacic.

 

"When there is a war going on, you lose a sense of purpose in going to school. It seemed like school wasn't going to get you anywhere," he says. "One thing I found purpose in was basketball. It seemed to be the easiest way to get anywhere, and in time, that proved to be true."

 

By age 16, he was playing professional basketball while attending Croatian high school. Luckily, his coach in Croatia knew the coach at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, who was interested in recruiting Kovacic. He played one year as a walk-on before moving on to Modesto Junior College in California the following year.

 

Kovacic's heroics on the basketball court caught the attention of San Diego State University coaches, who added him to their squad for his final two years as an undergraduate. He played for head coach Steve Fisher, who won the NCAA basketball tournament at Michigan in 1989.

 

"It was fun," Kavacic says. "We played at the United Center in Chicago before 24,000 people. We played Duke at Durham (North Carolina). All of those experiences are never going to go away."

 

Kovacic eventually graduated college at age 24 with a degree in applied mathematics and economics. At San Diego State, he also met his wife, Katja, a native of Finland, who was taking pre-med courses. They married in 2004.

 

"She was pushing this nonsense on me about going into pre-med and into medical school, but I thought it all sounded crazy," he says. "I was not interested."

 

Kovacic says his disdain for a medical career came from Croatia's method of educating doctors.

 

"My perception was skewed toward the Croatian way, where you go through five or six years of school and never have patient interaction," he says. "It was purely science-oriented."

 

Yet Kovacic's opinion changed after Katja began medical school, attending two years at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire, for her classroom work, followed by two years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she did her clinical rotations.

 

During those years, Kovacic was employed as an actuary for an insurance company in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was not very happy with his career path.

 

"While Katja was going through her rotations, she shared a number of stories about the rewards of practicing medicine and dealing with patients," he says. "It totally rubbed off on me. I gained some valuable experience working as an actuary, but I could not see myself doing that work for the rest of my life."

 

By this time, Kovacic was 30 years old. In order to get into medical school, he enrolled at Providence College to take some needed science courses. His wife was serving her residency at Brown and became friends with two other residents, Greg Rachu, MD, and Zobeida Diaz, MD, both 2008 graduates of the School of Medicine and Public Health.

 

"I told them I really wanted to change careers and apply to medical school," he says. "I also wanted to go to a school that welcomed older, nontraditional students, and they encouraged me to go to Wisconsin."

 

Kovacic says his first year at the School of Medicine and Public Health has been beyond his expectations - he has loved every minute of it.

 

He became actively involved in MEDiC, a student-run clinic for underserved residents in the Madison area.

 

"There are opportunities here that many medical schools in the nation don't have for first-year students," he says. "You receive hands-on interaction with patients right from the get-go. This is why I came to medical school: for the patient interaction and so I could make an impact on people's lives."

 

Kovacic says the hardest part of his first year was not having his family around, but they will all be together for his second year. Katja recently began a pediatric fellowship at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Their three-year-old daughter, Maya, lived with Katja in Providence during Kovacic's fall semester before she moved to Madison in the spring to be with her dad. Kovacic's parents were also in Madison to help out.

 

"We really believe that Wisconsin is an ideal place for raising a family," he adds.

 

Kovacic says he looks forward to the challenges he will face during his second year of medical school.

 

"I will study my butt off," he says. "The second year of medical school is academically the most intense year, so I will not have a lot of free time. The idea is to work very hard and enjoy the ride. After all, this is why I'm here."

 

When Kovacic is not studying, he still likes to play basketball against his younger classmates.

 

"I actually participate in two leagues," he says. "I have a lot of fun, because I'm the older guy who's not that good, but still knows the ins and outs of the game."

 

By Mike Klawitter

This article appears in the summer 2011 issue of Quarterly.

Date Published: 08/31/2011