Louis Zamperini: A Singular Case for the Benefits of High School Sports

Editor’s Note: Throughout the 2026-27 issues of High School Today, we are celebrating the 20th year of publishing the magazine by looking back at some of the key issues that the magazine has covered, and re-printing some of the most interesting and memorable articles that were published.

In this issue, we are featuring an article written by the magazine’s beloved legal issues expert, Lee Green, who sadly passed away in 2024. While Lee wrote the Legal Issues article for 120 issues of the magazine, he occasionally authored other features in the magazine. One of his (and ours) favorites was an It All Started Here article on Louis Zamperini, subject of the 2014 book and movie “Unbroken.”

We hope you enjoy remembering this piece penned by Lee in the November 2014 issue of High School Today.

Long before his extraordinary life became the subject of author Laura Hillenbrand’s nonfiction bestseller Unbroken and of the Angelina Jolie-directed movie of the same title scheduled for release on December 25, 2014, Louis Zamperini was a student-athlete at Torrance (California) High School whose participation in cross country and track would – through the events later to unfold in his life – dramatically illustrate the benefits of participation in school sports.

Born January 26, 1917, by his early teens Zamperini was struggling in school, regularly skipping classes, failing most of his courses, having disciplinary problems at home, smoking and drinking heavily, constantly getting into fights, and repeatedly being arrested for petty crimes. As recounted by Zamperini in Unbroken and in his autobiography Devil At My Heels, he was heading down a lifepath that would have almost certainly led to him dropping out of school and becoming involved in more serious criminal activities.

Then, as a 16-year-old sophomore at Torrance High School in 1933, a teacher and coach aware of Zamperini’s record as a juvenile delinquent, and who in a physical education class had seen a flash of Louis’ athleticism, talked him into joining the cross country team.

In Devil At My Heels, Zamperini recounts how he won his inaugural cross country race and for the first time in his life felt a flash of self-worth and self-confidence, a feeling that instantly set his life on a new course. That fall, the high school sophomore won the Southern California cross country state championship and a year later at the Southern California Track & Field State Championships, he not only won the mile, he set a National Interscholastic record of 4:21.2, a record he would hold for the next 22 years.

In 1936, at age 19, he qualified for the U.S. Olympic team and competed in the 5,000 meters in Berlin, finishing eighth – the highest American finisher in the event. But most importantly, he had turned his life around. Participating in high school cross country and track had kept him in school and he had quit drinking and smoking and fighting and he was never arrested again. And not only had he graduated from high school, he actually had come to love learning and had begun to dream about attending college, which he did at the University of Southern California (USC).

At USC, Zamperini, made the Dean’s List and, in 1938, set the NCAA record in the mile at 4:12.0 and went on to win NCAA national titles in the mile in 1939 and 1940.

The benefits of his participation in sports would become even more important in the other events that were about to unfold in his life. As did 15 million of his countrymen after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the military, in the Air Force, where he became a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator bomber. In April 1942, his plane crashed into the ocean 850 miles west of Hawaii in a vast empty area of the South Pacific, killing eight of the eleven men on board. Unbroken chronicles the ordeal at sea in a life raft of the three survivors of the crash, subsisting on captured rainwater and small fish eaten raw. One of the men died on their 33rd day adrift, and on their 47th day the currents took the raft into the Marshall Islands, unfortunately then held by the Japanese. Zamperini credited his survival during the month-and-a-half ordeal at sea to the tenacity, perseverance and never-give-up values that he had learned participating in sports at Torrance High School and at USC.

Those qualities would become even more critical to his survival over the next three years. After being captured, he was held until the war’s end in August 1945 in a Japanese labor camp where he was severely beaten and repeatedly tormented by a sadistic prison guard. Zamperini attributed his survival of those three years as a POW to the character qualities of determination, grit and stamina that he had developed through sport.

After the war, Zamperini returned home, completed his college degree, married his college sweetheart Cynthia Applewhite to whom he remained married for 55 years until her passing in 2001, and was so committed to paying forward the life-changing and life-saving gift of sports participation given to him in 1933 by that Torrance High School teacher and coach that Zamperini himself became a teacher and track coach, serving for 40 years at Banning High School in Los Angeles.

Although most people will never have to survive an ordeal similar to what Zamperini endured during WWII, his experience serves as an inspirational example of the role that sports participation can play in anyone’s life. As Zamperini stated in Devil At My Heels, “To persevere is important for everybody. Don’t give up; don’t give in. There’s always an answer to everything.” And another phrase recounted by Zamperini in his autobiography, one that he credited to his older brother Pete who would yell it at Louis whenever he began to falter during a race – a phrase that Zamperini stated he repeated to himself over and over again during those 47 days adrift at sea and 1215 days in the POW camp – well that phrase alone might be one of the strongest cases that can be made for benefits of participation in high school sports: “If you can take it, you can make it.”

Louis Zamperini passed away on July 2, 2014, at the age of 97. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, during his final days Angelina Jolie visited Zamperini in the hospital and showed him a rough-cut of the movie version of Unbroken, following which he shared with her his favorite Bible verse. Zamperini became a Christian after attending a Billy Graham Crusade event in 1949 and the verse was not only his guiding principle, but one highly appropriate to his life experience: 1 Corinthians 9:24 (NIV) “Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run in such a way so that you may obtain it.”