From Sarajevo to Harvard, Recruit Breaks Down Barriers

Sanjin Tunovic has some very vivid memories from his early life. Of course, most people would if they spent their childhood in war-torn Sarajevo, Bosnia.

“I think my memory goes back to when I was four or five, just remembering things about home,” Tunovic says, “and for the most part I remember most of the details of everything when we started moving around.”

It was only the beginning of the wandering for the young man and his family. After shots rang out in 1992, Tunovic, his parents, and his sixteen-year-old sister moved around the countryside, seeking refuge from persecution.

“We lived in Kosovo for a few weeks,” he remembers. “We moved to some of the different countries, like Montenegro, and we went back to my grandpa’s house.”

But then came the lucky break that eluded so many other Bosnian refugees. A sponsor in the United States would help bring the Tunovic family to the States. It was 1995, and Sanjin was just seven.

NEW PLACES, NEW FACES

It was a rough transition for the whole family. Sanjin’s sister had to learn English, take courses as a junior at Union-Endicott High School, and try to break into the social cliques that had already fully formed among her peers. Sanjin’s father Ibrahim was forced to take work below that of what he was accustomed; an engineer in Bosnia, his education wasn’t deemed sufficient for an engineering job in the States. Sanjin’s mother stayed at home.

Even for Sanjin, the youngest of the family, there was a long adjustment period.

“I came here, from first to sixth grade, and I was kind of a loner,” he says. “I stayed to myself.”

Those five solitary years meant what they mean for a lot of American youngsters:

“As a little kid I was pudgy,” Tunovic says. “I stayed at home and played video games. I was fat.”

But then a single moment of random decision changed the course of his young life.

“I didn’t really know that many people, and after sixth grade it came time to do school signups for football,” he said.

Here was a chance to join a social network, to find a niche in the complicated world of adolescence. He faced three choices: soccer, football, or track?

“All my friends were signing up for soccer, because soccer was a big thing,” he says. “And I was literally just about to sign up for soccer, and one of my friends was like ‘Hey, why don’t you try football? You’re kind of big, [and] my brother’s all big and he plays and they have fun.’ Basically, it was just a random moment that happened.”

That moment would, in time, prove to be the crucial factor in a young man’s assimilation. A game that he had never played, a game whose rules he did not yet comprehend, made him comfortable in his new home.

As summer ended and football practice began, it wasn’t long before Sanjin realized that he had stumbled upon something special.

“With football, the first day you show up, you’ve already got like 50 friends, 50 new friends and faces you can associate with,” he says.

The importance of football in Sanjin’s life was noticeable even to his coaches.

“He was never committed to anything but family,” says Union-Endicott head coach Shane Hurd, who also coached Tunovic in middle school. “It gave him a sense of belonging that I don’t know if he had since he left Bosnia.”

Besides, the new game was fun.

“We started hitting, and we started putting the pads on, and then we started running,” Tunovic says. “It was hard, but you just wanted to see what else was there.”

THE SHAPING OF A PLAYER

Young Sanjin picked the game up quickly. Hurd was impressed by the boy’s willingness to learn on the football field.

“It was very easy to explain concepts and techniques and schemes to him because he really did want to learn,” Hurd says. “We have a lot of kids that go through the peewee ranks here and they think they know everything by the time they get to seventh, eighth grade. [But] this is a kid who needed to be taught everything, and he was like a sponge.”

He began starting on the offensive line for Hurd’s varsity at Union-Endicott High School as a freshman, something Hurd says “just doesn’t happen here.”

It wasn’t long before recruiters came calling. Brown, Cornell, Massachusetts, and Hofstra all sought his skills, but Sanjin had a very particular goal in mind.

“As my recruiting process got more and more serious, my coaches asked me ‘Where else would you like to send tapes?’ And I obviously told them one place was Harvard.”

But Harvard showed little interest through the recruiting process while Brown and Cornell called. Seeking to get Harvard involved, Hurd decided to appeal for a little help.

“I just called him,” Hurd says now, “and I said ‘Isaiah, I don’t want to bother you, but I’ve got a kid—I think he’s an Ivy League player. Would you mind hooking me up with a contact?’”

The “him” was Isaiah Kacyvenski, Harvard’s all-time leading tackler, a three-time all-Ivy selection, and now a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, alone among U-E’s most famous and beloved alumni.

“He called me up and said ‘There’s a guy here, he’s a great guy, got good grades, and a bunch of great qualities about him, and his number one dream is to get into Harvard,’” Kacyvenski recalls. “For me, I’ve heard this plenty of times. The same story; it’s always ‘Can you get my son into Harvard?’”

But this was something different. Something that hit closer to home.

“I ended up finding out a lot about this kid,” he says. “His past, where he came from, his parents coming over as immigrants. And it’s a pretty amazing story, and it’s a hard-working, blue-collar kid. His story, as far as not having the easy road to where he is right now, just reminded me a lot of myself.”

Kacyvenski’s story is little short of legendary in the Endicott area. He, too, came from an immigrant background—of Polish ancestry—and had lived a difficult life before he was plucked out of U-E by Murphy and brought in to anchor the Crimson defense.

An abusive, alcoholic father, the death of his mother during his senior year of high school, and a poor upbringing meant plenty of hardship for Kacyvenski, whose story has been fodder for numerous national newspaper pieces and a segment on NFL Films.

But instead of leaving it all behind, ditching the community that he could have easily associated with an at times painful childhood, Kacyvenski became a role model like none other in Endicott.

“He’s been through a lot, and he’s been everywhere, and he’s at the top now,” Tunovic says. “So, he’s definitely looked at as one of the biggest role models, not just in the school, but in the community overall.”

He adds, “Especially if you play football and you go to U-E, you know exactly what he’s been through, and where he’s come from.”

“He’s a constant reminder of what you can accomplish,” Hurd says of Kacyvenski, “no matter what your background, no matter what your upbringing, no matter what type of adversity you had to deal with in your life, it’s not going to be compared to what this kid went through.”

Every summer Kacyvenski returns to Endicott to work out at his old high school. He had casually met Sanjin with a gaggle of other U-E players in the weight room, but had only talked with them briefly. Kacyvenski heard Tunovic’s story from Hurd and saw a little of himself in the young man. The call was easy to make.

“It definitely pulled some heartstrings, and it made me proud to be able to help someone that was in almost the same situation as me,” he says.

“I think he just needed someone to have faith in him, and get his foot in the door for someone to look at him…I just told Coach Murphy ‘It’s a great story, [and] just from talking to [Tunovic], he seemed like he’d be a kid that’d do Harvard proud.’”

FULL CIRCLE

Coach Murphy still remembers receiving the call from Kacyvenski, who asked him to look at a young lineman from upstate New York.

“In all honesty, my first reaction, not that I expressed it, was ‘Oh, another alum calling about a player,’” Murphy says.

“We get a lot of referrals by alumni, but very few of them turn out to be good players,” he adds. “When it’s Isaiah, it has a little bit more substance, but part of me was [saying] ‘boy, I get this a lot.’ But when we met the kid and we watched him on video, needless to say, Isaiah had really hit it on the nose.”

Murphy says he had little doubt that Kacyvenski pointed out Tunovic’s background to encourage the coach to follow up on the young man.

“He knew by telling me that I would be intrigued,” Murphy says. “He knew that we’ve had some success with kids that come from, maybe, less than traditional backgrounds.”

But this was no small catch. Tunovic was a second-team all-state lineman in New York’s AA classification, and a Binghamton Sun-Bulletin All-Metro selection his senior season, and the chance to steal him away from other Ivy programs was too good to pass up, especially for a team that lost three of its starting offensive linemen to graduation in 2006. And despite the fact that Murphy had not come across Tunovic until late in the recruiting process, the young man had already been admitted on the strength of his academic achievements, removing another barrier.

“He’s a very athletic, physical player,” Murphy says. “He’s obviously a good-sized kid, but he plays with a level of athleticism that kind of transcends his body type.”

When Tunovic reports for football in the fall, he’ll be a long way from Sarajevo: 4,270 miles, to be exact. Just going to college for many immigrant children is quite a feat, but attending Harvard college will bring with it special meaning.

“Even back [in Bosnia] Harvard was known,” he says. “You throw around Ivy League names like that, [and] you know you’re dealing with big names.”

But it may be even sweeter for Sanjin’s parents, who he says struggled with their adjustment to the U.S. more than he did.

“Sometimes my mom cracks jokes. She’s like, ‘Remember ten years ago where we were, or when we were moving around, what we were doing, and where we are now.’ One of the places we moved to when I was a little kid was literally this one-room house, and she’s like, ‘Oh, we went from that, you going there.’”

—Staff writer Brad Hinshelwood can be reached at bhinshel@fas.harvard.edu.