Ashley Harmeling ’05 (center) not only plays three very different sports, but she has won awards in each. |
All-American woman
Like any athlete training hard for the future, Ashley Harmeling ’05 spent the summer waking up well before sunrise. She’s a three-sport athlete, and the rare recipient of honors in lacrosse, soccer and squash. Harmeling wasn’t waking up early for any of these, though—she spent the summer in a high-paced internship with Goldman Sachs, working in the New York offices of their sales and trading division.
Sports and finance are in Harmeling’s blood. Her father worked in finance and played professional tennis, and her brother, also interested in finance, plays competitive golf. Harmeling said finance offered a “steep learning curve, high payoff and a high power environment that I thought I’d do well in.” And she did. Harmeling is an economics major with a high GPA and more experience under her belt than most college students can claim, regardless of the fact that most college students don’t manage to balance lacrosse, squash and soccer on the side.
Even before college, Harmeling was an athletic force to be reckoned with. She has been playing soccer since she could walk. “Squash,” she said, “I started at Andover because [the school] requires you to do something active each semester.” She started lacrosse in seventh grade. In 2000, she was Eagle Tribune Athlete of the Year. She’s in Andover’s Girls Lacrosse Hall of Fame, and, as if that weren’t enough, she was All-American in both soccer and lacrosse at Andover. When it came time to apply to college, Harmeling knew three things: She wanted to do something with finance, stay close to her home of North Reading, Mass. and “get in somewhere good.” She did all three, joining the Class of 2004 at Harvard.
Harmeling immediately joined Harvard’s lacrosse and squash teams, but was kept off the soccer team by a bout with mononucleosis during her first week of school. During her first year at Harvard, her squash team won the national championship. Still, something about the crimson college “didn’t feel like the perfect fit,” she says. The level of commitment that each of her sports required was “too intense for what I was looking for in college,” she says. Sports became more of a chore than a love, with coaches exerting control over everything from diet to how late their players stayed out at night.
Harmeling also felt constrained by Harvard’s core curriculum. She was following her interests in finance, but “I was taking those classes [in economics] and giving up language, which I couldn’t take unless I wanted to use up all my electives,” she says. "It was really frustrating, and my classes were 600-kids big, so I wasn’t getting much personal attention.” Coming from Andover, where classes were small, discussions intimate and regular, and attention from the faculty more than ample, Harvard was a shock.
After finishing a year at Harvard, Harmeling took a hard look back, realizing that she had been “going, going, going for five years.” It was time for a well-deserved break. “Most people asked if my parents thought it was the worst idea in the world to take a year off.” Actually, it was their idea. After working out a plan with her parents, Harmeling found two internships in Boston—one at Fidelity and another at a small wealth management firm. After finishing her internships in March, Harmeling and her best friend drove cross-country to San Diego and lived there for three months, “just being young and careless.”
“Careless” is hardly a word that fits Harmeling. She says her year off was “the greatest year of [her] life,” providing an opportunity to earn her own income, live on her own and get away from academics for a while. Halfway through the year, though, Harmeling realized that when the time came to return to college, it wasn’t going to be Harvard. “I wasn’t completely satisfied with Harvard, and the thought of change made me really happy,” she says. Harmeling wanted to attend a Division III school, still close to home, and this time with no core curriculum. She found all three, and this time joined the Class of 2005 at Amherst.
She spent the summer before Amherst working as a teacher and counselor, relaxing and trying to get in shape for the soccer season. “I didn’t know what to expect, so I wanted to come prepared,” she says. She arrived at Amherst “with open arms, wanting to love it so much that it was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everything just kind of fell in place without effort.” And the things that concerned her at Harvard? Gone. Even though the team practices were, for all purposes, completely the same, there were massive differences between Amherst’s and Harvard’s athletic programs. For one, “I don’t have to walk half an hour and across the Charles River to get to the team room, then another 15 minutes to the field.” But more than the time commitment, it was the mentality of sports at Amherst that hooked Harmeling.
“Everyone [at Amherst] understood that this was something that we loved… .We all loved having the team, but it wasn’t something that you’d have to carry with you at night when you’re doing your homework or into the next morning,” she says. It wasn’t a light commitment, though, especially when multiplied by three. Throughout the year, Harmeling was up at 7:30 a.m., at class until the afternoon, at sports practice until 6:15 p.m. and then home by 8 o’clock for homework or whatever else called.
And there was plenty that called. She worked with Amherst’s community outreach program and tutored on the weekends with A Better Chance Tutoring, a program for “motivated high school students of color living at the ABC House in Amherst.” She helped the students with homework and any other questions they had. She also participated in an economics society, and “besides that, I was trying to get good grades and have fun.”
Most people ask Harmeling “if I’m nuts” when she mentions she is a three-sport athlete. “Well,” she responds, “maybe I am, but every time I started a sport, I thought ‘there’s no way I’ll stop this.’” She can’t imagine giving up any of her three loves, each having equal weight in her life. “Most of why I enjoy all of this is the people on the team. Basically, it’s a social two hours, working hard, getting in shape, but we have so much fun.”
Harmeling has found three sports to be, in a way, easier than two. “They cut off each other’s pre-seasons. I find it really manageable and fun, but people seem shocked because they think it would take more time. In fact, it doesn’t.” Harmeling has found plenty of time to play, and she has played well. In her junior year, she won NESCAC’s Player of the Year Award in both soccer and lacrosse. “I was so busy at the end of the year, I didn’t really stop to appreciate it, but it’s a big honor, and I’m happy to be given it. There are a lot of good players out there. I’m lucky.”
Besides being Player of the Year, she was also named to First-Team All-America in soccer and lacrosse her junior year, and was ranked the top women’s squash player at Amherst. While she was at it, she shattered single-season school records in both lacrosse and soccer, leading the NESCAC in goals, assists and points her junior year. She was named First-Team All-NESCAC, NESCAC Player of the Year, First-Team IWLCA All-New England, First-Team IWLCA/US Lacrosse All-America and First-Team womenslacrosse.comAll-America honors. People stopped asking her if she was “nuts.”
Harmeling’s honors, devotion and drive have earned her a lot of respect at Amherst. Frank Westhoff, an economics professor who met Harmeling her first year at Amherst, has followed her career closely. “He’s been a big supporter of women’s athletics at Amherst,” Harmeling says. Westhoff sees her as “an excellent student…who was fun to have in class,” and a woman “whose athletic pursuits complement her academic pursuits.” Along with Westhoff, Harmeling credits her coaches and parents with much of her development, both athletic and personal. “All three of my coaches have been unbelievable,” she says. “I consider all of them friends, and my parents have been unbelievable too. They let me do my own thing, but have completely supported me.”
Harmeling says that in her athletic career, two games stand out. In the national semi-finals for women’s squash, Amherst was tied four-all with Cornell, who had beaten them during the regular season. Harmeling was playing an opponent who had beaten her earlier, and theirs was the last match of the tournament. “We were playing at Yale in the big exhibition court, so there must have been 300 people watching,” she says. Harmeling was down 1-0 in a race to three. “I turned around and saw my teammates sitting there. I had always wanted them to push themselves really hard,” she says. Harmeling, in turn, pushed herself, winning the set 3-2 in front of some of her closest friends and supporters. But the memories aren’t just about winning; one of her best moments was the lacrosse team’s final game against Middlebury in 2003. “Even though we lost, I didn’t give up,” she says, “and I think that was big.”
Amidst the hustle and bustle of three sports, countless honors and a rigorous academic schedule, Harmeling has never lost sight of where she is. “A lot of why I wanted to go to Amherst was that I knew it would give me time to do [extracuriccular activities]. I think maybe there were things I could have done if I had time,” she says, “but I still have a year, so I can remedy that.” She probably will. Harmeling is the type of person who won’t settle for being unhappy. “If something isn’t working for me, I like to stop and say ‘How can we change this?’” Her switch from Harvard to Amherst was evidence enough of her drive. “Everything [at Amherst] has been relatively perfect,” she says, “and I love it so much. Ultimately, that’s what I wanted to be able to say and I couldn’t at Harvard.”
After graduation, Harmeling wants to work in finance, a world she’s already familiar with. She says the corporate world didn’t seem as cold and anonymous as some would have you believe. Working at her internships, especially with Goldman Sachs, Harmeling has had plenty of one-on-one attention and mentoring. It sounds curiously like Amherst.
What about sports after Amherst? Harmeling isn’t about to give up on the things she loves. “Once I get into a stride with working, I might want to join some weekend leagues,” she says. Working in New York City this summer, she found a rarity—a Diamond, in fact; one of her Goldman Sachs colleagues was Brooke Diamond ’03, an Amherst graduate who was an All-American three-sport athlete with an impressive academic history. Sound familiar? Diamond plays soccer in her off time and has introduced Harmeling to the world of weekend leagues, proving that finance and sports don’t have to be estranged after graduation. “I’ll definitely end up playing sports,” Harmeling says. “Eventually, I’ll have my own family and play with my kids.”
She still has a year to go, though, and she isn’t taking any of it for granted. “I don’t want to go in with big expectations,” she says. “I just want to enjoy the year. There’s so much I want to do while I have this time, so I think it’ll be a matter of relaxing and having fun and enjoying everyone at school. I’ll be drinking it all in as much as I can.”
—Samuel Masinter ’04
Photo: Frank Ward
Amherst
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