Brains and Brawn

STANFORD, Calif. – Fifth-year senior Nathan Traxler has been selected the Pac-12 Wrestling Scholar-Athlete of the Year, the conference office announced today.

The award, which is presented in each of the 24 sports the Pac-12 sponsors, was established to honor collegiate student-athletes that are standouts both academically and in their sports discipline.

A native of St. Charles, Illinois, Traxler graduated in 2020 with 3.54 cumulative GPA in computer science. He will complete his master's degree in the same field this spring. He is a three-time NWCA Scholar All-American and a three-time Pac-12 All-Academic honoree.

A 2019 Pac-12 champion at 197 pounds, Traxler helped guide the Cardinal to its first-ever Pac-12 team title that same season. A three-time NCAA qualifier, he boasts a 74-25 career record and was tabbed an NWCA Second Team All-American in 2020.

Traxler has held two internships as a software engineer at Apple (summer of 2019 and summer of 2020). In 2019, he worked on a team of integral engineers building and improving tools that are used to efficiently operate Apple data centers across the world. As a full stack engineer, he worked on frontend and backend of those tools. In 2020, worked on the Apple.com search bar incorporating AppleTV+ content into the search results.

A three-time team captain, Traxler is the seventh Cardinal to be named Pac-12 Scholar-Athlete of the Year since the awards inception in 2007-08. He joins Tanner Gardner (2008), Jake Johnson (2010), Nick Amuchastegui (2012), Peter Galli (2017), Nathan Butler (2018) and Paul Fox (2019) as Stanford recipients.

The Cardinal wrestles at the Pac-12 Championships on Sunday at Gill Coliseum. The first round begins at 11:30 a.m. and the finals will air on Pac-12 Networks at 6 p.m.