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Radnor's Michael Li headed to resurgent Caltech

03/14/2016, 4:15pm EDT
By Josh Verlin

Radnor's Michael Li (above) will join the basketball team at Caltech, one of the foremost research institutions in the world. (Photo courtesy Radnor basketball)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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The link held Michael Li’s last chance to play college basketball, as well as a chance to attend one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world.

For nearly six months, the Radnor HS senior had waited, unsure about his future. The school he was desperate to get into kept its admissions decisions close to its vest, waiting for all applications before deciding which select high school seniors get to walk its hallowed halls.

“They never actually set a certain date where they release all the decisions, they just release them all at once and people start looking,” he said. “Historically I saw they were always released the Saturday before Pi Day [March 14], which is this Monday, so yesterday I just checked my portal, and it said ‘view admission status’ and I clicked it.”

And that’s how Li found out he would be taking classes and playing basketball at the California Institute of Technology--more commonly known as Caltech.

Home to 34 Nobel Prize Winners, Caltech is one of the foremost research universities on the planet, ranked among the top 10 schools in the world by several major publications. Fewer than 10 percent of applicants are admitted, and the entire undergraduate population numbers only around 1,000.

Caltech's coaches, which first saw Li at the Hoop Group Academic All-American Camp in Reading last summer, was one of two schools that recruited Li, a 5-foot-9 point guard, to play basketball; MIT was the other, but he was denied admission there in October. If he didn’t get into Caltech, he was considering attending Pitt, among other larger universities, where his hoops career would end.

Thus began the wait.

“It was tough because after getting denied from MIT...it really made me doubt myself,” he said. “It was really nerve-wracking to just wait and see.”

To help his chances of getting in, Li -- who has a 3.8 GPA at one of the region’s best high schools plus a 2180 on his SATs -- took several SAT subject tests, getting a perfect 800 on his Math Level II exam, which he believes helped him end up on the right side of the cut line.

Seeing that work pay off on his computer screen on Saturday made it all worth it.

“It was just a huge weight off my shoulders, waiting this entire time,” he said. “This would have been the last chance I had to play, so it was a huge relief.”

Those who’ve heard about Caltech’s basketball program might know the 310-game losing streak it had in Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) play between 1985 and 2010, that many in the school took pride in being poor at athletics because it showed how seriously they took their academics.

But things are changing in Pasadena.

This past year was one of the best in program history, a 9-16 year where the Beavers went 7-9 in SCIAC play, just barely missing out on a spot in the league’s four-team playoffs. That’s a long way from where they were just a decade ago.

“I remember reading, when I first started talking with them and finding out more about the basketball program, how they went 250 games or like a quarter-century without winning,” Li said, “and now they’re bringing in actual recruits, they’re being competitive and beating other teams and actually being considered for playoffs.”

A lot of that credit goes to Dr. Oliver Eslinger, who just wrapped up his eighth year as head coach. Eslinger joined the program right near the end of its long losing streak and slowly turned it around; much of that progress is detailed in an excellent story by Sports Illustrated’s Chris Ballard.

Li has done a lot of reading up on his new program and coach, and sees quite a few similarities between his future coach and Radnor’s Chris Monahan.

“He’s very competitive and meticulous. I know he studies every little detail possible,” Li said of Eslinger. “Any type of statistic possible--shooting at this basket as opposed to that basket, or percentage of shooting when you can on two (feet) as opposed to a one-two step shooting, he emphases all the little details and any little thing possible to get that winning edge.”

A planned Computer Science major with a minor in business, Li has been interested in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) path since eighth grade, when he taught himself HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript during a self-guided class called Soundings, which encourages students to “explore student-selected themes that merge their adolescent concerns with global issues" by picking a topic of their choice and pursuing it. Li decided to make his own website.

Taking AP Computer Science in 11th grade sealed the deal.

“I’m not sure if I would like to work for a Google or an Apple or start my own thing, but I know down the line I’d definitely like to do something with like robots,” he said.


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