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 When
Olga Itskhoki Harvey first stepped onto Cornell’s
campus in the fall of 1993, it was strictly to be a student.
Harvey, who had just arrived from Russia, was a life-long
recreational tennis player. But she wanted to get adjusted
to academics and life in America. She wasn’t even aware
of a tennis team on Cornell’s campus anyway.
After a couple of weeks of adjustment, Harvey heard there
were sports teams at Cornell and decided to give a shot at
playing sports and going to school at the same time. She
found the tennis coach and approached her with the idea of
maybe trying out for the tennis team.
“Obviously, she was a little skeptical in the
beginning,” she remembers with a chuckle. “Most
coaches are with walk-ins. But she gave me a chance to hit
with the players and I ended up making the team.”
Harvey is modest when talking about her achievements at
Cornell. She is soft-spoken and courteous when she speaks,
giving off an aura of gentle kindness that is altogether
charming. She says she “luckily” kept the number
one singles spot throughout her career at Cornell.
However, Harvey’s quiet voice starkly contrasts her
performance on the tennis court. She continually made the
most noise in Ivy League women’s tennis, winning the
inaugural Player of the Year award for tennis in 1995 and
again in 1996, her senior year. Amazingly, she never lost a
League match in three years.
Perhaps even more remarkably, before Harvey joined the
squad, the Cornell women’s tennis program hadn’t
won an Ivy League match in 11 years. That would be a
combined 0-73. Yet Harvey led the Big Red to a third place
finish her first year (4-3 in Ivy play), a second place
finish her junior year (5-2) and a third place finish her
senior year (5-2).
Although Harvey helped out the Big Red tennis team
tremendously, her teammates also helped her with the
adjustment of moving from Russia to the U.S. She credits
them with producing a family atmosphere for a girl a long
way from home. The experience has even built lasting
relationships for Harvey.
“I really had a great time. We had a great team,”
she says. “We were just trying to win as many team
matches as we could. So, it was great, and my teammates are
probably my best friends now&emdash;five or six years after
graduation. These are the people I keep in touch with the
most, and it was a great three years. Cherished
memories.”
Harvey’s journey to Cornell started in Moscow, where
she was born and raised. She lived in an apartment complex
in the middle of Moscow, and her parents still live in that
same apartment building. Harvey studied at the Secondary
Magnate School, attending the same school throughout
elementary, middle and high school.
“Eleven years spent in the same building,” she
says.
To quell her studying, Harvey turned to sports. Her father
was a former professional volleyball player in the Ukraine,
and her mother was an avid tennis player. She credits her
parents for getting her involved in all sorts of sports:
figure skating, skiing and tennis among other things. Harvey
decided to focus solely on tennis and practiced every
day.
Sports and academia aren’t meshed together like they
are in the U.S. Sports aren’t affiliated with high
schools. She joined a tennis club as her main after-school
activity and she quickly stuck out as one of the best in the
club. She was offered a chance to concentrate more on the
tennis aspect of her childhood.
“They asked me to join a specialized school where the
schedule was somewhat flexible,” she says. “You
could practice tennis in the morning and evening and take
classes during the day.”
Harvey chose the academic career instead and didn’t go
to the tennis school.
“But I managed to still be in sports quite a bit
without giving up my high school,” she says.
The Secondary Magnate School was focused on studying
English, which she started learning in second grade. She
studied the language, among other things, for 10 years.
After Harvey graduated from high school, she enrolled at
Moscow State University where she studied economics. Just
before Harvey started classes at Moscow State in 1991,
former communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to
resign after a successful coup attempt by the political
opposition, and the Soviet Union split into small republics
shortly thereafter. Included in this new era was a change in
economics. Harvey admits those were some doubtful times in
her life.
“It was kind of uncertain for awhile. First, how it
would affect the country, and then also me personally,”
she says. “But it seems like things didn’t change
that much in terms of academics. Obviously, overall the
country became quite different and I think some smaller
republics were affected more than Russia was.”
Although Harvey’s introductory courses went well at
Moscow State, she felt she wasn’t getting the education
that she needed. Many of her economic professors were just
starting to grasp Capitalist economics after teaching Marx
economics their entire careers. So, after two years of
studying at Moscow State and armed with 10 years of learning
the English language, Harvey set her sites on a better
education in either England or the United States. After some
friends got her applications to a couple of universities in
the U.S., she chose Cornell as her institution of learning.
She moved to the U.S. from Russia without ever having
visited the campus. But she thought since Cornell was in New
York state, it must be very close to New York
City…naturally.
“I wasn’t really sure exactly where Cornell
was,” she now says, remembering her naïveté
with a laugh. “I ended up quite far from New York
City!”
Harvey concentrated on food industry management in the
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, located
in upstate New York. She worked several internships in the
food industry, and was unsure of which she wanted to
enter&emdash;either the manufacturing or retailing
standpoint of the food business. She took the
middle-of-the-road approach and now works with both
retailers and food manufacturers at Daymon
Associates, an
international company specializing in the sales and
marketing of private label consumer products. Harvey works
in category development -- with packaging advancements,
marketing promotions and pricing -- for private label
consumer products, helping them compete with national
brands. She has been with the same company, in several
different capacities, since graduation from Cornell. Her
current responsibilities include working with cereals,
cookies, crackers, pasta, soup and condiments.
“I need to be kind of an expert in these areas for the
companies,” she says. “I need to know what new
brands are doing, what new items and packaging concepts are
out there, what’s hot and what’s not, and helping
different retailers develop items in those areas.”
Now, nearly six years after graduation, Harvey has had time
to reflect on her experiences at Cornell -- both as a
student and as an athlete.
“After you graduate, the years start blurring and you
don’t remember each one as vividly as you do your
college years,” she says. “I really remember very
well my three years (at Cornell) and the different
semesters, what I’ve done, participating in different
organizations, along with just going to school and playing
tennis. Fun memories!”
Harvey also credits her experiences of playing tennis as an
excellent precursor for her preparation in her career.
“There are a few different areas that I think helped
me. First of all -- and I think that it may be a standard
phrase -- time management was one of them. You really
don’t have that much time, after classes and practice,
to get ready for exams and everything,” she says.
“So, you learn to focus and not waste time with just
one thing. And in the corporate world, you have so much
going on that it’s really important to prioritize and
get everything done without sacrificing all of your personal
time. And also I think from a leadership standpoint, that
was kind of my first experience as a captain at Cornell. I
learned to motivate my peers to focus and to strive for
success, and I think that’s definitely helping me now
in the business world. Because sometimes in the team
environment, it’s very important to take the lead and,
in fact, sometimes you even need to learn how to step back
and let other people take the lead.”
Harvey was one of only two Cornell women’s tennis
players to be named to the Ivy League’s Silver
Anniversary tennis team and is one of only eight players to
be named first team All-Ivy three times in her career. She
remains the only Cornell women’s tennis player to ever
receive the Ivy League Player of the Year award, and was a
driving force in the team’s most successful period,
from 1994-1996. But Harvey also saw her tennis career as a
hobby -- an extension of her academic experience in the Ivy
League.
Indeed, academics were an important part of Harvey’s
life at Cornell. She was a two-time Academic All-Ivy
selection (1995 and 1996) and an Academic All-American in
1996. She says she didn’t put much pressure on herself
when she played. Rather, she took a relaxed approach -- a
philosophy that she thinks many of today’s
intercollegiate athletes should prescribe to.
“I think that just enjoying it and good things will
come is the right motivation,” she says.
“Especially if we’re talking about the Ivy League,
where academics is the number one priority and sports is the
second piece. Keeping tennis, or any sport, as your hobby
and not looking at it like it’s your job is important
because you can truly enjoy it throughout your life. But
once you cross that line and it becomes a job, a chore, or
something you do from whatever standpoint, to make money or
whatever, then you can’t enjoy it the same way. And
that doesn’t mean that looking at sports that way is
bad, because some people choose sports as their career, and
that’s a completely different focus. But I think that I
still love tennis because it never became a job. It was a
hobby for me.”
--by Nathan Fry
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