For any high school student, the prospect of attending Harvard University, the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning, is an exciting enough prospect.
Cazenovia High School’s Lindsey Lawson will get a chance to live that dream.
Having just completed her junior year at Cazenovia, Lawson has announced her verbal commitment to Harvard in the fall of 2020 on July 1after a long series of visits to several dozen prospective schools.
A two-sport standout at Cazenovia, Lawson first made a big impact in volleyball, helping the Lakers reach the 2017 state Class B final four, the first time in program history Cazenovia had reached that point.
Yet it was in basketball that Lawson drew more attention from colleges, Harvard included. As a junior in 2018-19, Lawson, a 6-foot-3 forward, averaged 20.5 points and 14.1 rebounds per game.
The combination of those numbers and her work with an AAU team, I-90 Elite, attracted both scholarship and non-scholarship colleges, but Lawson said that Harvard’s academic reputation, combined with her good rapport with players and coaches, made her choose the Crimson.
Lawson is not the only Central New York basketball star to make her way to the Ivy League. Westhill’s Anna Ross had a fine career at the University of Pennsylvania, while Meg Hair, who led Jamesville-DeWitt to three consecutive state Class A titles, is currently a sophomore at Penn.
Harvard has a solid basketball history, too, with 11 Ivy League titles won or shared and six NCAA Tournament appearances, though none since 2007.
In 1998, the Crimson became the first, and to date only, women’s team to prevail as a no. 16 seed over a no. 1 seed (Stanford) in the NCAA Tournament. Harvard went 17-13 a season ago.
