Overlooked Athletes Make Grade at Major College Level : College football: Two former Harvard-Westlake players have earned scholarships after walking on at Cal.

Attending Harvard-Westlake High, Marty Holly and Iheanyi Uwaezuoke will tell you, was an academic experience second to none.

Rigorous classwork, intense competition and a demanding faculty at Harvard helped make Holly and Uwaezuoke competitive students today at the University of California, Berkeley.

But playing sports at Harvard, the pair also will tell you, was an athletic experience second to some.

In an intensely competitive high school sports climate in Los Angeles, Harvard often is overlooked by college recruiters who scour familiar schools such as Carson, Banning or Crespi.

But when Cal (3-2) meets USC (2-1-1) at the Coliseum on Saturday, Holly and Uwaezuoke will serve as running, catching and blocking examples of how a couple of kids from a tiny school can make it in big-time college sports.

Holly, a junior fullback and 1989 Harvard graduate, and Uwaezuoke (pronounced ooh-WAY-zo-kay), a freshman wide receiver and 1991 Harvard graduate, both walked on at Cal. And both have earned full athletic scholarships.

“We’re not known as a school for sending athletes out to colleges,” said Harvard Coach Gary Thran, now in his 20th season.

“Other schools play a much-higher caliber of athletics and emphasize it much more. We’re almost 100 percent sure all our kids are going to college somewhere, so at the end of our season I ask the kids if they are interested in going on to play football anymore.

“If they are, I have to start making calls.”

Holly was the pioneer of the two, taking his chances as a walk-on after a serious hamstring injury early in his senior high school year turned recruiters away.

“When you come from a small, small school, which Harvard is, there’s not a whole lot of attention given to it on the athletic level,” Holly said.

Holly had finished an outstanding junior season in which he rushed for 1,400 yards and scored 21 touchdowns while being named MVP of the San Fernando League. In his senior season, he opened with 304 yards and four touchdowns against Bell-Jeff before being sidelined by the injury.

His brother, Langston Holly, was attending Cal when Marty was a senior at Harvard. Langston knew his younger brother’s football confidence was shaken after the injury and took to calling the Cal football coaches himself, posing as Marty.

“He’d call them on the phone and say, ‘My name is Marty Holly,’ ” Marty recalls with a laugh. “And the coaches said, ‘Send the film.’ ”

Holly was accepted academically at UCLA and Cal, among others, but decided on Cal because of his brother, now a medical school student at UCLA.

“I knew I wanted to play football,” Holly said. “But there was that little doubt in the back of my mind: Can I do this? Will I be able to do this? If I do, will I be wasting my time? Will my academics suffer? In the end, it was a risk I had to take.”

A risk well-taken. Holly (5-foot-11, 210 pounds) is currently the backup to Lindsay Chapman who figures into Keith Gilbertson’s offense.

“He’s as good a blocker as we have in the backfield,” the first-year Cal coach said. “He’s just an all-around player. He can catch, he can block, he can run with the football.”

Holly earned his scholarship after a solid redshirt freshman season in 1990 as a walk-on under Bruce Snyder, who told Holly that if he proved “durable” his reward would be a scholarship. Holly carried 12 times for 62 yards and scored on a 28-yard run in a 38-31 victory over UCLA that broke Cal’s 18-game losing streak against the Bruins.

This year, Holly has 17 carries for 73 yards and five catches for 28 yards. And, with Chapman in his final year, Holly expects to be the program’s No. 1 fullback next season.

Holly’s success inspired Uwaezuoke, who spent his senior year caught in the Harvard paradox. While his grades (2.8 GPA) and high scores (more than 1,000) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test were a credit to the Harvard experience, the lack of serious attention he received as an athlete also was typical.

Uwaezuoke, a Times All-Valley selection in 1990, was courted by UCLA and Duke. Both schools had talked of a scholarship, then told him midway through the recruiting season that other players had been signed instead. Uwaezuoke was welcome as a walk-on, though.

For the introspective Uwaezuoke, who lists Homer’s “The Iliad” as his favorite book, the slight hurt. An Inglewood resident, Uwaezuoke could not help but wonder if attending a public high school might have raised his recruiting stock.

“I was just devastated,” Uwaezuoke said of the snub. “In the spring of my senior year I was thinking, ‘I’ve gotten this good education, I’ve done OK throughout my years here, I’ve made a name for myself at the school but, damn, what am I getting out of it? How is this benefiting my future?’

“It was hard for me to express that to Coach Thran and people like that without them saying, ‘How selfish are you being after we’ve given you this education?’ ”

But Holly encouraged Uwaezuoke, who had been accepted academically at Cal, to try as a walk-on.

Uwaezuoke, (6-2, 185) spent much of his redshirt year working with the sprint coach and lowered his 40-yard time from 4.65 to 4.44, now the second-fastest on the team. After spring practice, Gilbertson decided that Uwaezuoke would be a scholarship football player at Cal.

“Iheanyi was really disappointed,” Thran recalls of that senior spring at Harvard. “I think he made up his mind that ‘I’m gonna show you that you were wrong’ to all the recruiters. He’s sure done that.”

Uwaezuoke caught his first pass as a collegian in Cal’s 35-16 loss to Washington last week. He remains a third-string receiver behind a talented crew that includes All-American Sean Dawkins. But Gilbertson believes that Uwaezuoke’s name will become well-known around Cal football.

“Iheanyi is a kid with a real bright future,” Gilbertson said. “He’s a big kid who can run extremely fast. He’s got good hands. Next year he’s a guy you would hope would come out and compete for one of the spots.”

Uwaezuoke and Holly, still close friends, have more in common than just football. Both would like to attend law school after graduation.

Uwaezuoke even walks around campus with a baseball cap that reads “Student Athlete.” The word “Student” is printed three times larger than the word “Athlete.”

You can take the student-athlete out of Harvard, it seems, but you can’t take Harvard out of the student-athlete.