But at Harvard, the intense academic environment coupled with the varsity sport time commitment has been particularly difficult to adjust to.

“This fall, it was a huge transition period for me to go into college, so hopefully in the spring I’ll be able to manage my time a little better,” Xie said. “Being able to find that balance again is really important to me.”

Helping her adapt to college life have been her fellow members of the golf team; which, with only eight members, is one of the smallest varsity sports teams on campus.

“The size of the team brings us very close to one another,” Xie said. “It’s really cool how we can all fit in one van together and practice together every morning and just get to know each other. We’re all pretty different, but somehow it works.”

For Xie, perhaps the most important distinction between high school and college golf has not been the workload but the tightness of the college team, a sentiment Zhou echoed.

“Everyone on the team is really close to each other, and we all have this mentality of team first,” Zhou said. “You really get to connect with all the team members personally, and it’s a good support system because when everyone else is having trouble, we’re all there to help each other.”

Like Xie, Zhou—the 19th-ranked golfer in the nation in the class of 2015—also excels in the classroom. She was recently named a U.S. Presidential Scholar candidate on the basis of her academics, and attended Gunn, which, like Paly High, is known for its highly competitive atmosphere. For her too, balancing college golf and school has been a different beast.

“[College] was a bit hard to adjust to at first, especially with the step up in academics as well,” Zhou said. “Also, with new responsibilities and having to live far away from home and having to take care of everything myself, high school to college was just a hard transition.”

Judging off of Xie and Zhou’s performances on the golf course, though, you would not be able to easily pinpoint their difficulties.

Xie, who has started all four tournaments of the year thus far, has stood out on the team since her collegiate debut at the Diane Thomason Invitational in September. There, she led the team to a fourth-place finish thanks to a team-best second place individual finish. Since then, she has proven to be one of the Crimson’s most consistent players, landing in the top 20 individually in every tournament she has participated in.

Zhou has also played a crucial role on the team, helping lead the Crimson to top six finishes in each of the three fall tournaments she competed in. Her best performance thus far occurred at the Yale Invitational, where she placed 20th overall en route to Harvard’s sixth-place team finish.

Together with sophomore Lita Guo, the two freshmen figure to play big roles in the future of the Crimson, which won two of the four tournaments it participated in this fall.

“I think it’s pretty apparent that everyone’s doing well,” Cheng said. “In the next few years, I’m sure we’ll keep trending in the right direction.”