“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.