Coast to Coast

It is no secret that despite more and more rigorous admissions policies, there are certain high schools that send a disproportionate number of students to Harvard. Roxbury Latin, Philips Exeter and Philips Andover, the list goes on; all these schools have long-established academic traditions that allow their students to distinguish themselves for the admissions office.

There are certain schools that endear themselves to Dean Fitzsimmons and company for another reason: their athletic programs. Over the next few weeks I will be exploring this interplay between academics and athletics in the admissions process, beginning with two public schools in California: Los Gatos and Corona Del Mar. Each school has six student-athletes on Crimson rosters, the most of any public school in the nation.

A COMMUNITY OF SUPPORT

As public schools, Corona Del Mar and Los Gatos are not able to recruit and support athletics in the same way that their private counterparts can. However, both schools have benefited from being in prosperous communities with high property taxes, and therefore greater school funding.

“I don’t know if it’s justified, but you hear other people say that it’s the public school that acts like a private school,” sophomore football player Andrew Berg said of Los Gatos, his alma mater.

Los Gatos is located in the heart of Silicon Valley and is host to the headquarters of Netflix and Image Shack. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, over a quarter of families living in Newport Beach, where Corona Del Mar is located, have an annual income over $200,000.

“A lot of this can be attributed to being in a community where we’re privileged to have these opportunities,” said Evan Zepfel, a senior on the men’s water polo team and Corona Del Mar graduate. “There are parents who have the time and money to drive us to practice every day and we’ve just been lucky to have the opportunity to dedicate this much time to athletics. Without the support network back home, I know I wouldn’t be here and I can say with a fair amount of confidence that most of us wouldn’t be here without athletics.”

There is, however, a difference between excelling in athletics alone and being able to handle Harvard’s academic requirements.

Brandon Vance, now a bartender and track coach at San Jose City College, coached seniors Christine Reed and Nico Weiler in the pole vault at Los Gatos.

“Traditionally, the school values academics first,” Vance said. “The community here is very strong, and the high school doesn’t support sports that strongly. Realistically, the message from the administration is school first. So you end up having these kids like Christine—one of our better students—that is also an athlete. You really get well-rounded kids.”

A TRADITION OF SUCCESS

“Every single person at Harvard from Corona Del Mar is an athlete,” Zepfel noted. “Now that I think about it, as far back as I can remember, every person from my school who went to an Ivy League, or Ivy-League-caliber, school was an athlete.”

The Corona Del Mar water polo program has won 13 California Southern Section championships and, with Evan’s younger brother Ben joining the class of 2016, will have had at least one representative on the Crimson for eight straight years.

“I have no idea why it’s happened,” Zepfel said. “When I was a senior, there were three seniors on the team. We were the top three students in our class and we went to Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. There’s definitely a tradition of academic success combined with success in the pool.”

Corona Del Mar has also benefited from the presence of freshman Evan Ramsey. Ramsey’s father, Christopher, is the Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Water Polo, and part of a larger community in Newport Beach, which is very supportive of water polo.

“There aren’t that many colleges that play water polo and, at least for me, it was tough looking at a certain quality of schools,” Zepfel said of his college decision. “It kind of limits the ones you can pick to seven or eight: Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, UCLA, Cal-Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna.”

Sport-specific success is common across the board. Reed, now the co-captain of the Harvard women’s track team, noted that every coach at Los Gatos had competed at the Division-One level, including former Olympian Karl Keska. As a result, there are currently three Los Gatos grads on the Crimson track team.

“It clusters by sport,” Reed said. “Coaches realize that they can start recruiting from a single area and athletes realize that it’s possible to go to certain schools. For me, seeing Sally Stanton ’08 [another Los Gatos grad] succeed here in my discipline really made me step back and think that I might be able to do the same.”

LEAVING THE WEST COAST

Despite their significant presence on campus, there is at times a conceptual barrier for Californians choosing a school in the Northeast as their college destination.

“It’s a little bit random just because we’re a pretty small town where going to the East Coast for school is not really the norm,” Reed said. “The California state system is so good, academically and athletically, that most people who go to high school in Los Gatos stay in California.”

They are not only traveling far from home, but also giving up something that is routinely bemoaned by students from warmer latitudes: the weather.

Zepfel noted that he worked out with his brother, Ramsey, and Jeff Reed ’11 over winter break.

"In a lot of ways it was just like being in practice at Harvard. The only difference is we were in California in the sun instead of freezing on the walk across the river.”

But water polo and track are two sports that are traditionally dominated by sunny states. For others, the decision was more straightforward.

“Field hockey is an East-Coast-based sport,” said Noel Painter, a freshman who led the Crimson with eight goals her rookie season and also attended Los Gatos. “California only has four colleges with field hockey, so the only places I looked at were on the East Coast. When you talk to normal people here, they know what field hockey is, that’s just not the case back home.”

Beyond the weather and popularity of the various sports, the Harvard name also plays a significant role in the recruiting process.

“When I first started getting recruited, I decided that this could be something special,” Berg said. “It’s not really something that most people get to do. I could have stayed close to home and been comfortable, or I could come out here and try to do something different. Now that we have a good-sized community of Los Gatos kids here, hopefully that gives kids a little extra confidence to take a shot and apply, whether they’re athletes or not.”

ADJUSTING EXPECTATIONS

Athletes who come from heavily involved high school programs note a strange dichotomy in the transition to playing for the Crimson. The time they commit to their sports is often inversely proportional to the number of fans attending.

“I played in front of two or three thousand people in high school, and you get used to having at least a relatively full support structure,” Zepfel said. “That’s not to say we never get [any fan support] here, but we kind of have to work for it. I don’t know if things would be different at a different school, but just in terms of the entire school’s mindset towards athletics, it was weird at first playing games with no one there. It was really weird.”

Not only is there often a lack of fan support—especially for the more obscure sports—but there is also in many ways a cultural disconnect between the way athletics are viewed in high school and how they are perceived on Harvard’s campus.

Corona Del Mar has a policy that requires students to play a sport for at least two years. If you cannot make a team, you are forced to take physical education classes as an equivalent.

“I wouldn’t say you were looked down upon, but it was definitely socially stigmatizing if you weren’t on a varsity team at CDM,” Zepfel said.

Los Gatos, which is in a joint school district with nearby Saratoga High School, similarly gives athletics a special cultural significance.

“Kids are given the option of going to Saratoga or Los Gatos, and the stereotype is that Los Gatos is for the athletes and Saratoga is for the smart kids,” Reed said. “There’s a lot of pride in the athletics at Los Gatos. Being on a sport there is definitely a socially significant thing. But the academics are very important as well.”

The adjustment from high school to college is rarely an easy one for any college freshman, and even more so for those with such immediate commitments as off-season workouts and daily practices. In preparing psychologically for college, students often lionize the college experience. Transitioning to a culture that puts academics so far above athletics often forces student-athletes who have committed to the Crimson to temper their expectations.

“Everyone in town goes to football games in high school,” Berg said. “Here, you’re not seeing your neighbors or your buddies at the games. With less of a community of support and more rigorous academics, the lifestyle is definitely more stressful here. At the same time, it’s college so it’s more fun.”

THE STUDENT-ATHLETE AT HARVARD

People often criticize the emphasis that American culture puts on intercollegiate athletics as misplaced. Unlike the majority of the world, athletics in the United States are primarily organized on the scholastic level. Indeed, it was only last month that U.S. Soccer fell into line with the rest of the world and totally divested its developmental academies from high schools.

The student-athlete is a popular archetype in the American psyche, and if anything can be learned from the narratives of the athletes from Corona Del Mar and Los Gatos, it’s that the archetype is still very much alive in corners of the country.

“When I decided to come here, I knew that sports would take a back seat,” Painter said. “You come here for your education and field hockey or football comes second, or third. One thing that’s great is that my time playing sports and taking hard classes at Los Gatos definitely honed my time management skills.”

Time management is not only a skill that most college students struggle with, but also one that is made even harder when a number of hours each day are being filled up by commitments to an athletic team.

“With six hours being taken out of your day, it really forced you to manage your time if you wanted to succeed in high school,” said Zepfel, an Economics concentrator who turned in his senior thesis less than an hour before meeting with me. “Now that water polo is over, I’ve gotten terrible at managing my time. I wake up in the morning and don’t know what to do with my day, and end up getting nothing done.”

The role that athletics plays in the admissions process at Harvard is a touchy subject in campus discourse. Despite the self-imposed requirements of the Academic Index, the process of recruiting and the likely letter is often misunderstood. At the same time, the Ivy League has a surprisingly high attrition rate in its athletics due to the lack of binding athletic scholarships.

No matter how one feels about student-athletes at Harvard, what’s happening in the classrooms and on the playing fields of Los Gatos and Corona Del Mar can’t be ignored.

“[Los Gatos is the] best place in the world to be a teacher and a coach,” Vance said. “The kids are driven, and I feel like that comes from the community. People just want to make themselves better, and even though I’ve never been to Harvard, I feel like it’s the same environment there.”

—Staff writer Alexander Koenig can be reached at akoenig@college.harvard.edu.