While basketball is fun, Anna Harvey has her sights set on engineering
Lakeville South High School graduate Anna Harvey looks for a teammate to pass to during a 2018-19 game. Harvey was a Miss Basketball Minnesota nominee this year along with the school’s Athena Award winner.
Photo by Jim Lindquist/sidekick.smugmug.com
Posted June 8, 2019
by Tad Johnson
Sun Thisweek
Dakota County Tribune
Many people in the Lakeville community know Anna Harvey as the point guard from the Lakeville South High School girls basketball team.
But what they probably don’t know is the newly minted graduate put in a few hundred hours of work to lead the design and creation of 200 awards to mark teachers’ years of service or their retirement in 2019.
“People loved them,” she said. “There were some tears. It was great to see all of the hard work pay off. That’s the good stuff.”
While Division I basketball is in Harvey’s future at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University this fall, she has her eyes on much bigger things with a major in the school’s Integrated Business and Engineering Honors Program.
She said the awards project is exactly the kind of work she’ll be doing in the Lehigh program, as it asks students to use both their hands-on technical skills but also soft skills in management and communication.
Harvey said among her duties in leading the school project was helping create the design, making sure there were enough funds to purchase the materials, meeting with administration officials, recruiting students to help with the assembly-line process and making many of the awards herself with wood cutters, laser engravers and more.
“There were a lot of good splinters there,” she said.
She said she worked on the project on the weekends and even came into the school on “senior skip day.”
Harvey said working in a STEM class is her favorite. It doesn’t make any difference what kind of project or object she’s making, she said those are the courses where she’s never looking at the clock.
Growing up playing basketball with boys, Harvey said going into wood shop classes wasn’t a problem for her.
While there are increasing numbers of girls going into wood and metal shop classes, she said the boys still largely outnumber the girls.
For Harvey, it doesn’t matter your gender, as long as you can do the work well.
She said she was inspired to take this path by both her mother, an architect, and her father, who works for a graphic design company.
“I love both of their workplaces,” Harvey said. “They have all of their projects all over the place. It is so creative.”
She said she’s ready to start her new adventure in a new place, but it comes with some drawbacks.
“I’m going to miss my family a lot,” Harvey said. “But I know in my heart that Lehigh is the place I want to be. It’s beautiful and on the mountainside.”
Harvey committed to Lehigh in March of her junior year, saying she considered several other schools.
She said the fact that Lehigh had the exact major program she was looking for combined with the mid-major basketball opportunity make it a perfect fit.
“I wanted to have a social life, too,” she said of not wanting to play, for example, at a Big Ten school where there would be more basketball demands.
She said she’s adept at multitasking, as evidenced by the award project, but also with juggling three-hour basketball practices during the season and holding down Advanced Placement classes.
Harvey said she was able to do it with a lot of help from her teachers, coaches and school administrators.
The 2019 Miss Basketball Minnesota nominee said she is excited to get started with college and basketball practices, saying some of the players on the Lehigh squad are Minnesota players she faced in AAU or on the high school team.
“One of the things about basketball is it’s a game of mistakes,” Harvey said. “You can either wallow in it and have it consume you or get past it.”
She said the other great aspect of basketball is it’s the ultimate team game.
“When I’m in the flow I don’t remember any of it,” she said. “I’m so in the moment, living it so much that time flies, but you still have to be aware of the clock.”
During the game, she says she relies on her instincts along with her shooting and dribbling ability, trying not to think too much about executing a certain move or shot.
“It’s a great game,” she said. “I love it.”
She said also enjoys her role as the point guard, facilitating action and scoring chances for her teammates.
She said one of the great joys of the past season was playing with her sister, Maria, who is a ninth-grader at Lakeville South.
Harvey also relished her time as a Cougar Buddy, working with seventh-grade girls basketball players in Lakeville.
She said she served as a special assistant coach, talking to the girls about strategy, technique and the mental side of the game.
“I would give them some pep talks, take them aside when things didn’t go right,” she said. “I would tell them that: ‘I know what you are feeling. I’ve been there.’ The main thing is to make sure you have fun with them and let the game be fun.”
It’s the kind of message she’s heard from many of her coaches through the years.
She said her basketball and tennis coaches served as great mentors and even additional moms or dads.
“They made me unafraid. They made me brave. They made me not be a coward,” she said.
Tad Johnson can be reached at tad.johnson@ecm-inc.com.
Tad Johnson 