SPENCER, Mass. — After Tyler Grossman graduated from Moniteau High School, he had plenty of opportunities to play basketball in college.

Grossman, though, took a different path.

He decided to pass up basketball. Instead, he chose to leave Western Pennsylvania and travel nearly 3,000 miles away to Eugene, Ore., and a fresh start.

“I always wanted to travel and to see new places and meet new people,” Grossman said. “A fresh start appealed to me.”

Grossman enrolled at the University or Oregon and for the first two years there he thought he wanted to be a computer programmer.

But the major never really clicked for him.

One finally did: product design.

It was a new program when Grossman joined it before his junior year at Oregon in 2008. He was immediately hooked.

“I always liked to build stuff,” Grossman said. “The cool thing about that major is we never had tests. We just had projects that we had to complete for our professors, who mostly were from Nike. It was kind of crazy. I was always told that once you get into a field you like, school’s not that bad. I enjoyed being in the studio at midnight.”

Grossman now works as a designer for Berkshire Blanket, a company about 30 miles from his home in Spencer, Mass.

He designs packaging for a wide range of products.

Learning his craft at Oregon filled the competitive void that was left in his life without basketball.

“That really helped,” Grossman said. “I played basketball on club teams and in pick-up games, but it wasn’t the same as being on a team. But our projects were very competitive. We all wanted to make the best final product. We always wanted to make our product a little bit better and impress our professors.”

The design studio became his basketball court.

When Grossman was on the basketball court at Moniteau, he was hard to stop.

Grossman was a four-year starter for the Warriors. He finished his career with 1,647 points, 687 rebounds and 581 assists.

During his senior year in 2005-06, he averaged 21.4 points per game and was named the Butler Eagle Boys Basketball Player of the Year.

He also helped Moniteau to a 22-4 record and the program’s first Keystone Shortway Athletic Conference title.

His 1,647 points eclipsed the career scoring record that was held by his father, John.

Tyler Grossman still holds the record. Kyle Armagost made a run at it last season, but fell 21 points shy.

“I think it always was a goal to break my dad’s record,” Grossman said. “It was one of those things where once I got serious about basketball around the fourth grade, I just had to break it.”

During his junior year with the Warriors, Grossman battled a nagging hamstring injury that slowed him greatly. It threatened to keep him from breaking his father’s mark.

“I had a good sophomore year, but after that junior year, I didn’t know if I could do it,” Grossman said. “Luckily, I was able to battle through it.”

These days, Grossman is enjoying his life in Massachusetts, where he lives with his girlfriend of three years, Joelle Johnson, who is a Butler High graduate.

Grossman, who began his job with Berkshire Blanket in February, hopes to someday design sports apparel, such as shoes, bags and clothing.

Some of the products he has designed recently will hit stores around Christmas.

“It’s going to be exciting to see it on the store shelves,” Grossman said. “It’s like your baby.”