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The College Road Trip From Hell: Life on the Fringes of Division I Men's Basketball

Jesse Zarzuela’s knees hurt.

He says there’s nothing structurally wrong with them and they’ve never hurt before this season. They just hurt.

Zarzuela doesn’t know exactly what ails his suddenly achy joints, but he does know why they hurt. He’s been playing a lot of basketball lately. In fact, he played more basketball than any other NCAA basketball player, men’s or women’s, at any level of the sport in the season’s first month. Zarzuela is the starting point guard and leading scorer for Coppin State in Baltimore, and he has just crossed the finish line of what might have been the most taxing opening month in recent college basketball memory.