This is a story about where it started for New Orleans Saints third-round pick Zack Baun, so start with the time Zack Baun was nameless.

He was just a kid playing basketball and trying to make some friends in a new place, nameless not for long because someone was about to walk in and watch him throw down the thunderous type of Tomahawk dunk that begs a follow up question: Who is that?

It was the summer of 2013, between his sophomore and junior years of high school, and Baun had just moved to Brown Deer, Wisconsin, a town of about 12,000 people on the northern border of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. Rob Green is the football and track coach there, and on that day intrigue interrupted his otherwise routine day overseeing the school’s weight room and summer conditioning programs.



Green and Brown Deer basketball coach Kelly Appleby had just moved from the weight room to the field house, where there was a pickup game in progress, and WHAM, Baun sent home the dunk that made Green need to know more. Who was this mystery child with the effortless explosive athleticism and the smooth stride?

That, Appleby said, is Zack Baun. And apparently he’s going to school here. The wheels started turning in Green’s head.

There may have been a time when Baun lived in relative anonymity, but it was this point where that started to change. Two years after his dunking introduction at Brown Deer, he was a local celebrity with almost 100 career touchdowns and a couple school record marks for the track team. Five years after that he was an All-American linebacker for the beloved home-state Wisconsin Badgers. And a year after that, the Saints spent the better part of a day figuring out how to trade up and select him in the 2020 NFL draft.

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