Former Ferris State and Greenville standout football player Justin Zimmer burst onto the scene last season with 13 tackles, a sack and a forced fumble in 12 games with the Buffalo Bills which included the AFC Championship game.
"It was definitely a break out year," Zimmer said. "I felt good coming out of the end of the year. Obviously the season didn't finish exactly how we wanted it to, but it was a good year for me overall and it really put some more film out there for me to evaluate myself so that I knew exactly going into this off season what I needed to accomplish to take it a step further."
Zimmer is now set to give back to the town where he grew up hosting a youth football camp in Greenville on June 26th.
"Last year was actually going to be the first year," Zimmer said about the camp. "I was starting to plan everything out and with COVID it got cancelled, so I had the groundwork going into this year, so it was the perfect year to start up a new camp."
The camp is for K-12 and will cost $40 per participant, all proceeds will go to For Goodness' Sake, a non-profit that helps families in need around the holidays.
The deadline to register is June 1st, registration can be found by clicking here.
Zimmer is also still looking for businesses to sponsor the camp.
"The camp helps out locally," Zimmer said. "It gets kids to go out play football get an experience and see players they can look up to."
The camp includes several former Greenville football players that have played collegiality as well as Zimmer's former Ferris State teammate and two-time Harlon Hill winner Jason Vander Laan.
Zimmer hopes it will inspire kids the way he was inspired when he was younger.
"It was David Kircus who played at Grand Valley he came back and played in a basketball game and one of my buddies got one of his gloves and we thought that was the coolest thing ever," Zimmer recalled. "The fact that he came back and played basketball, we found it so cool, and I thought that bringing a camp back for football and doing that for the high school would really be cool for the younger kids."
Zimmer says the camp will be following recommendations by the CDC when it comes to mask wearing.
