With a starting role on the Harvard women’s basketball team and a resume that includes Hungarian junior national team experience, Reka Cserny is not your typical freshman in Ec 10.

Cserny comes to Harvard after deferring a year to compete for Hungary in the European Junior Championships. Now she is ready to battle for the Ivy League Championship with the Crimson.

Phenomenal basketball skills aside, Cserny’s journey to the States shows the level of dedication she has to succeed at more than just the game of basketball.

“My main reason for coming here was to be able to play basketball at a high level and get a good education because in Hungary it’s not easy to do both of them,” Cserny said.

Harvard first established contact with Cserny based on scouting reports, and she set her sights on coming to Cambridge. After failing to post high enough verbal scores on the SATs on her first attempt, Cserny ordered books from the States and then studied for a year, improving her scores markedly on her second try.

“The initiative was all hers and not ours,” said Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith. “It was all 100 percent hers to make this happen for her in her life, and I really admired that for a kid that young. She probably could have had her pick of schools, but she wanted Harvard.”

Cserny also established contact with fellow Hungarian and Harvard track standout Dora Gyorffy ’01—the two-time NCAA high jump champion—when she began considering Harvard.

“When I started to think about coming to Harvard, I knew that [Gyorffy] was here,” Cserny said. “I called her, and we met in Budapest.”

The pair still keeps in touch, and Harvard hopes that Cserny will become the same sort of superstar for the basketball team as Gyorffy was for the track team.

Cserny, as one of just ten players selected to compete with Hungary in the European Championships, is a standout competitor in her native country. Cserny said she would like to continue playing at an elite level, but in a different context.

“It was really good to play on the national team, and I hope I have an opportunity to play in something like that here [in the States],” Cserny said.

The path to international competition started in the second grade for Cserny, when she began honing her basketball skills for typical reasons.

“My mother used to play basketball, and I was taller than average,” Cserny said. “I kept playing because I loved it.”

Now 6’3, Cserny is the inside presence of Harvard’s dreams.

Delaney-Smith said that Cserny is even more of a complete player than Diana Caramanico—the Ivy League’s all-time leading scorer who graduated from Penn last year—because of her three-point shot and her post up.