This type of success story is familiar, written by everyone from Frank McCourt to the directors of the animated movie Fievel Goes West. In this version, though, the sequence is slightly different. It begins, of course, with your customary immigrant to the United States. She is a girl born in Eastern Europe, now a teenager, and unable to really speak English fluently as of yet.

“In many regards. I think she’s faced a lot of challenges in her life,” a friend says.

And in this coming-to-America tale, the first school the girl goes to is Harvard, where she concentrates in Economics. She is 6’3, probably more athletic than you are, has since become the starting center on an Ivy title-contending women’s basketball team, and she now…

All right, fine. Admittedly, the tale is not all that similar to the other ones you’ve heard before. So maybe the friend quoted above is actually her coach, Kathy Delaney-Smith. And maybe the challenges she refers to concern turning down scholarship offers, not standing in breadlines.

Reka Cserny is, ultimately, no Fievel—and certainly no Frank McCourt.

But since when did success in the United States, or at least Cambridge, have to be clichéd?

HUNGARY FOR MORE

According to Cserny, it all started in Budapest.

It was in Hungary’s capital city that her mother began to play basketball professionally, thereby allowing her daughter Reka to sit in on practices. And the apple—or “alma,” as it were, in Hungarian—quickly turned out not to fall very far from the tree.

“I wanted to play,” the senior says. “I wanted a coach when I was in the second or third grade.”

So Cserny attended one of the better high schools in Hungary, Fazekas. As a sophomore, she began to formulate her plan for the future, like any good potential Harvard student. Given the structure and scheduling of the native cup-team system, she concluded, the prospect of attending a very good native university and simultaneously excelling in basketball in Europe was slim.

In America, on the other hand, she could do both. Cserny balanced the scales, decided that “academics was at least as important as basketball” to her, and with that, embarked on a path to the Ivy League that brought her in contact with her future head coach, Delaney-Smith.

But the first time Cserny ever stepped foot in the United States was in the fall of her senior year for a basketball travel schedule, “just a couple of games.” The first visit she even took to Harvard was in May just months after that.

But from the get-go, Cserny exhibited little of the typical freshman restlessness towards Cambridge. Given her tour of duty with the Under-20 Hungarian National Team, in fact, Cserny opted to stay with the team for a year and defer her studies.

Afterwards, she took some required English courses in the summer for foreign speakers, and finally stepped inside Lavietes Pavilion.