“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.