EuReka! Hoops’ Pure Gold

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.

Her older brother, newly married, became the only one in her family to join her abroad. But she would find “a very good friend” and an extended family, of sorts, very close by.

HARVARD CAMARADERIE

Although Hana Peljto ’04—one of the best players in Harvard and Ivy League history—has now been lost to graduation, Cserny fully understands the significance of taking up her mantle. Peljto, after all, is someone who helped make the center into the tremendous player she is now.

“It was really good to have her, because she pushed me every day in practice,” Cserny says. “She made me better. She was tough on me. I could never zone out because she was always there, and I had to focus on stopping her and playing against her.”

Of course, she adds, given their common Eastern European heritage, “there were also a couple of topics that we could talk about, while the rest of the team had no idea what we were saying.”

The results of their dialogue have only been impressive. In addition to being Ivy League Rookie of the Year as a freshman, each of her three years Cserny has also been named first-team All Ivy, leading the league in steals for the previous two campaigns.

Additionally, she was a model center last season, averaging 18 points a game, shooting better than 50 percent from the floor and leading the team in blocks. Cserny was also the only one in the Ivy League to post at least 60 assists to go along with 60 steals, and was just the 11th in school history to pass the 1,000 career-points barrier.

“She is the all-everything player,” Delaney-Smith says. “I really honestly feel that she is one of the strongest players in the country. I think she’s terrific. She’s tall, she has phenomenal low-post moves. She has probably one of the best hooks, best series of moves in the low post.”

And as for her European roots?

“She’s obviously a good three-point shooter,” Delaney-Smith adds. “Who doesn’t love her European steps when she takes it to the hole? You can’t stop her, especially opposing forwards. She’s our best defender on the post. She’s very athletic, she’s very active, she has wingspan.”

THE NEXT BIG STEP

Now, however, Cserny has one more adjective to tack onto her storied résumé—leader.

She and fellow senior Katie Murphy will serve as the veterans on the Crimson, and with Peljto gone, you can bet opponents will be keying in on her.

To Delaney-Smith, however, Cserny more than has the requisite skills to be a leader, and is already one of the “most organized people” she has ever known.

“She will take care of whatever needs to be taken care of a month in advance,” Delaney-Smith recalls. “She just sees what needs to be done and gets it done. She doesn’t have to be asked. She’s really admired by her teammates for everything. Her humbleness, her humor, her unselfishness…. She’s a woman of few words, but when she speaks, everyone listens.”

And in addition to having the right mentality, Cserny will also be bringing some legitimate—albeit limited—big game experience to the captaincy.

In the Crimson’s last two trips to the NCAA Tournament, Cserny impressively emerged as the team’s leading scorer in both, putting up 16 against North Carolina in 2001 and then notching a game-high 25 against Kansas State in 2002. She already knows how to deal with pressure.

The difference, of course, will be dealing with it devoid of Peljto.

And in that sense, Cserny has to be afraid. She has to somehow fear the impending double-teams, the swarms of defenders that will be focusing on her alone, the burden of once again contending for a league title, albeit with four freshmen and just one other senior on the team.

Cserny’s prearranged goal, in the end, is not only to survive, but to excel.

For her part, she “doesn’t think about it that much.”

“It’ll be different,” she says, “but I try not to put so much pressure on myself because that can backfire.”

And hey, why not? She has another reason to be confident, as well, even beyond the points, the awards, the experience and the respect she commands from teammates and coaches.

In a way, she’s been through this before, although on a larger, grander scale.

When looking back at what’s taken her to Harvard—her challenges, her journey—this story can only seem familiar.

—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu.