Kamehameha senior Zoe Leonard has always been good with numbers, a reason she scored well in the SAT with a 1,880 on her one attempt, carries a 4.03 grade-point average, and has her pick of colleges.
Kamehameha senior Zoe Leonard has always been good with numbers, a reason she scored well in the SAT with a 1,880 on her one attempt, carries a 4.03 grade-point average, and has her pick of colleges.
She turned down numerous athletic scholarships from other places to play volleyball at Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school in Hanover, N.H., where Dr. Seuss is a distinguished alumni.
Ivy League schools don’t offer athletic scholarships. Dartmouth doesn’t provide academic scholarships either. But the Big Green gave Leonard a 50 percent financial-aid package, and, best of all, presented her with another challenge — swim with similar-sized fish in a competitive pond.
“They don’t offer athletic scholarships, but it’s a much better academic opportunity,” Leonard said. “I’m very proud.”
Her dad, Chris Leonard, has always been her volleyball coach on the Pilipaa club team to her youth days, and walked with her through the rigid Ivy League recruiting process for a student-athlete called the Academic Index.
The Ivy League uses SAT I and II, and GPA to figure out a ranking tree. The better scoring an admitted class, the higher the school’s AI. Student-athletes are thrown into the same application pool as everyone else. They all go under an admission board’s microscope to gain entrance.
Basically, it’s a major league tough nut to crack to get into Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Penn or Columbia, especially as a student-athlete.
That’s why it’s been a proud parent moment for Chris and Kathy Leonard every time someone tells them, “Congratulations on Zoe.”
“Few kids get an educational opportunity like this,” Chris Leonard said. “She’s worked really, really hard to get where she is. My wife and I are grateful that Zoe’s goals and hard work have paid off.”
Here are a few numbers that will be memorable for Leonard: 10 and 250. She is part of Kamehameha’s 10th class, and when she gets a degree in economics and political science in 2019 that will be Dartmouth’s 250th class.
The 5-foot-10 Leonard has a ton of athletic and academic awards. It runs at least two pages long. But a team highlight is Kamehameha’s reign with four BIIF Division I titles during her career. Last summer, she was on the USA Volleyball Women’s Junior National A1 training team as a libero.
It’s likely Leonard will head to the frigid cold of New Hampshire as a setter for Big Green coach Erin Lindsey, who’ll spread the aloha. She’s a Punahou graduate like her sister Lindsey Berg, a three-time Olympian and silver medalist, now playing pro ball in Turkey.
On a first-name sibling side note, coach Lindsey had the good fortune of being named Erin instead of Lindsey. Otherwise, her official title would be Dartmouth volleyball coach Lindsey Lindsey.
The Berg sisters grew up as setters. Erin played at North Carolina and was the conference player of the year, while Lindsey was always considered too small at only 5-8, but holds Minnesota’s career assists record.
Dartmouth has Punahou graduate Julia Lau, a starting libero, for two more seasons. If Leonard ever gets hungry for spam musubi, she can knock on Lau’s door. They’ll be the only players from Hawaii on the roster for the Big Green, who went 13-12 in Lindsey’s fourth year.
One unique thing about Dartmouth is that the college operates on quarters, and has a renown study-abroad program. The college has been named No. 1 in undergraduate teaching five of the last six years.
The Dartmouth Peak Performance program encompasses all student-athlete services, including strength and conditioning, nutrition, massage, academic support, leadership development and career services.
It helps that the college, with an enrollment of about 6,300 students, has an endowment of $4.5 billion. Still, money doesn’t buy Ivy League championships. The Big Green are still searching in an Ivy League forest filled with lots of rival thorns for their first one.
Dartmouth was the last Ivy institution to go varsity in women’s volleyball. Prior to 1994, it was a club sport. Princeton has the most Ivy League titles with 14, the last in 2007. Harvard is the defending champion.
Different hobby
Putting in more time after practice or an off-day has never been hard work for Leonard. She considered sharpening her ball-handling in the back yard after a long day nothing more than another day in a routine.
That was her hobby, and her mindset. It was noticed in February at the Las Vegas Invitational, where Lindsey saw Leonard, who’s also a statistician with the Kamehameha boys team, play with Pilipaa.
“I love that she is a volleyball junkie, always looking for the next opportunity to be in the gym,” Lindsey said. “I think she will bring a high level of passion to our team, but also with composure and a super high volleyball IQ.
“The competition in the Ivy League is much higher than I think the larger volleyball community realizes. All of our teams regularly beat teams completely funded with full scholarships. Just this past year we beat St. John’s and Middle Tennessee State, Harvard beat Santa Clara and Georgia, and Yale beat Georgetown. Those are just a few examples, we regularly land recruits that, like Zoe, have multiple scholarship offers from other Division I institutions.”
Serve others
Leonard has been president the last two years of the school’s Ambassadors of Ke Ali’i Pauahi club, which provides community service and helps raise higher-education scholarship funds for native Hawaiians.
Dartmouth seems like the perfect fit for her.
“The best thing about Dartmouth is not having to sacrifice either exceptional academics or athletics, they can have both. It is the true student-athlete experience,” Lindsey said. “When our players graduate, the combination of the experience they had as a student-athlete here, their education in the classroom, the internship and study abroad opportunities and the vast Dartmouth network set them up to succeed in whatever they choose to pursue. Most of our players have job offers months before they graduate.”
Chris Leonard pointed out that Ivy League applicants all have excellent grades, but it’s the meaningful things attached to a resume that sometimes make the biggest difference.
It’s a point that has already hit home with his daughter.
“One day if I’m successful, I’d like to have a job in that field (with the Ke Ali’i Pauahi club) where I can give back,” she said. “I feel that’s important.”