The Stories of Harvard: Noah Harrison

The Stories of Harvard: Noah Harrison '16 ‘18, Men’s Water Polo

The Stories of Harvard spotlights Harvard athletics alumni on their professional journey beyond their time in Cambridge and reflects on a specific game or event as a Crimson student-athlete from a first-person perspective.

An Introduction

Noah Harrison. I was originally in the Harvard class of 2016 and then stuck around to continue a master's degree that I finished in 2018, while continuing my water polo career through the 2016 season. I concentrated in molecular and cellular biology, had a secondary in economics, and a citation in Spanish. Then I did my master's in immunology through the medical school at Harvard. After college, I went to Vanderbilt for medical school in Nashville for four years. Now, for the last four and a half years, I've been an orthopedic surgery resident at Washington University in St. Louis. Once I finish residency in 2027, I'm going to do a year of fellowship in orthopedic trauma surgery at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Maryland. I’ll then go into practice after that as an orthopedic trauma surgeon.

Game Preview

Harvard made its NCAA Championship debut at home a week prior with a 13-12, sudden-death overtime win over Bucknell to earn a trip out west to face UC Davis. The two previous match-ups between the Crimson and the Aggies were each decided by one goal with Davis winning most recently in a defensive slugfest, 7-6, that started hot with a 3-3 score after the first quarter of action.

UC Davis was a program with two prior Final Four appearances, but was in the quarterfinals for the first time since 1997. Under Minnis, Harvard had been building to this moment. Just five years prior, the Crimson finished 10 games under .500 and now at 26-6 stood one win away from the Final Four in a sport traditionally dominated by West Coast powerhouses.

No. 1 USC and No. 2 UCLA were already on to the Final Four as Harvard and UC Davis, tied at No. 9 in the national polls, competed in one of two play-in games set to decide the national semifinals.

Noah Harrison's NCAA Quarterfinal Story

Setting the Scene

The story of that 2016 season and the story of that Davis game probably starts in preseason. We stepped onto the pool deck that summer and I remember that the culture and the environment was just different. That was my fifth year of playing, and in all four years before that, it had never quite felt the same. I don't know if at that point in preseason, any of us thought we were going to get to that place, winning a championship and being in the quarterfinal, playing for a spot in the Final Four.

I think we kind of surprised ourselves during the regular season. We then had to get through our three biggest rivals; MIT, Princeton, and Brown to win the conference championship. Winning that was an incredibly special moment because that was the first time Harvard had won a conference championship in water polo. From there, we had a very close game against Bucknell in the NCAA play-in game, which went to sudden death overtime. Coming out of each of those games, we were just like, "All right, we can do this.” We were just having so much fun being on that championship run. We were enjoying every second of it as a team, and that's what really made it special.

NCAA Tournament Memories

What's funny about that UC Davis game, and I feel like this almost defines my season, is I don't really remember any of the goals that I scored in that game, not a single one. But I remember a lot of other people's goals and a lot of those other moments. UC Davis was a really good team that year – they were fast, they were smart, they had a very good offense, and they were strong on defense. We battled back and forth with them throughout that entire game.

When we got down into overtime, I remember Viktor Wrobel, who had been relatively silent all game offensively, despite having one of the hardest shots I've ever seen in my life, come down on the outside and lob the goalkeeper. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had seen Viktor try to lob, but this one came off perfectly, went right over the goalie, and dropped in. Then, with about a minute left, Austin Sechrest, who had already had a bunch of clutch goals in our postseason, gave us the goal that sealed the game. That's a goal I'm going to remember for the rest of my life.

The Recap

Harvard led UC Davis, 5-3, after one quarter of play with a Noah Harrison snipe the last goal before the break. A 4-1 Davis run tied that game at 8-8 at the half.

The Crimson trailed 12-11 after three before Harrison scored his third of the game to go in front at 13-12 with six minutes left on the clock. From there, the game went back-and-forth for the rest of the fourth quarter.

A goal in each end of overtime, first by Wrobel and then by Sechrest, gave Harvard a two-goal lead and the Crimson held on for a 16-15 win and advanced to the program’s first Final Four. Harrison, who contributed two assists and five steals, was one of four Crimson players to record a hat trick along with Colin Chiapello, Joey Colton and Charlie Owens. In net, Anthony Ridgley added nine saves and three steals.

Final Four Bound

The Celebration

Austin Sechrest and I had a running joke throughout the season. During the preseason, Austin scored a meaningless goal in some drill. He then turned around and did the most over the top, ridiculous celebration I’d ever seen. I turned to him and said, “The only time you can do that again is if you score the game winning goal in a championship game.” Fast forward to the last minute of the second overtime of the UC Davis game. The ball works around, goes to Dan Stevens, who puts it up to Austin, who buries the ball in the back of the net from the three post, sealing the game and sending us to the Final Four. He turns around and I'm staring right at him, and say “Austin, now’s the time!” He then hits that exact celebration in what was a perfect, full-circle moment. There's a photo on the wall at Blodgett Pool of me taken at that moment. I have both of my fists pumped with a giant smile on my face and then you can see a hand making a peace sign in the corner of the image, and that's Austin Sechrest's hand. That photo captures everything for me because it was the moment we knew we were going to the Final Four and it was such a perfect moment for Austin and the team. It encapsulated the feeling of that season, where it truly did not matter who scored the goal. Everybody's individual accomplishment was the team's accomplishment. The team's accomplishments were everybody's individual accomplishments.

The Handshakes

Anthony Ridgely anchored us in the goal that year. He had a great relationship and an individual handshake with every single person on the team. If somebody made a big stop on defense or scored a big goal, we would see him at the quarter break, or when the ball was out of bounds, and he would quickly dab up the other person. On top of that, he was a monster in the goal. We could rely on him at any point to come up with the save that we would need to make up for a mistake and bail any one of us out. You can't ask for more in a goalie than that, right?

Team Culture

We had come into every season wanting to win a conference championship because that hadn't been done in Harvard men's water polo history up until that point; let alone go to the Final Four or try to make it through the NCAA tournament. I specifically remember that first practice [of the 2016 season]. We all stepped on the pool deck, and the environment, the vibe, was different. It was much more relaxed than it had been in previous years, and the practices were just more fun. Everybody was just enjoying the time that we had together, and that culture continued throughout the year. And I honestly think that's what took us as far as we went that year.

Harvard Continues to Win in the Water

Since reaching the 2016 Final Four, Harvard men’s water polo has continued to pile up 20-win seasons; achieving the milestone in every completed season between 2014 and 2025. The 2019 squad broke the 2016 team’s program record for wins with a 29-win campaign and ran through the regular season and NWPC Tournament unbeaten until falling to Bucknell in the NCAA Tournament.

In the NWPC, Harvard has won fewer than eight games only once, the 2016 season, in a 10-game campaign. The Crimson have gone 9-1 in each of the last three seasons between 2023 and 2025. Joey Colton became the program’s first All-American to earn third team or better and opened the door for a program that has now landed an All-American third team selection on five occasions.

Harrison's Harvard Experience

Arriving in Cambridge

Harvard was a huge growth experience for me. I'm very thankful to have had those opportunities, but it was also a different world for me. I grew up in Southern California, in a surf town, Huntington Beach, and went to public school. Culturally, Harvard was a very different place than where I came from. I ended up relying on my teammates a good amount to navigate this new environment. I remember Chris Miao doing a deep clean of my wardrobe before some social events. He helped me pick out some outfits that would not look absolutely ridiculous. I have to thank Chris and a lot of other people for kind of helping me adapt to the environment.

I had come into Harvard knowing that I wanted to be in the sciences. In particular, I kind of knew or had a strong feeling that I wanted to be pre-med once I got onto Harvard's campus. Academically, it was a relatively straight shot. It wasn't easy, but it was a straight shot,

Harvard Influences

Ted Minnis had a huge impact on me. Ted has always been someone who cares about his players as people first, as young men and women. He had a tremendous impact on me in terms of maturing as both a player and a human being. I'm very thankful I had the opportunity to play for him. I would not be the person that I am today without Ted's influence.

On the academic side, I enjoyed having a broad education. In the fall of freshman year, I took a course by Michael Sandel called Justice, which isn't offered in-person anymore, but it was an amazing course. He went through nearly all of the philosophies that there are. We discussed how to think about what is good, what is wrong, what is just, and what is unfair. Having the opportunity to think through and discuss all those openly definitely shaped my views about the world and about right and wrong. It opened my perspective to how other people think and gave me a better ability to see the other sides of arguments and where other people are coming from.

On the medical side of things, I have to give a lot of thanks to three people in particular; Shiv Pillai, who at that time was running the master's in immunology program at Harvard Medical School, Martin Samuels, who was the assistant director of undergraduate studies for the molecular and cellular biology concentration, and Michael Starnbach, who ran an immunology lab at Harvard Medical School. I came to them with this half-baked idea of starting a master's degree in immunology so that I could keep my athletic eligibility to play a fifth season of water polo before I even finished undergrad. None of them looked at me like I was crazy. They wanted to make it happen and helped me navigate all the layers of the Harvard bureaucracy to actually make that dream a reality. So I ended up going down this path where I did seven semesters of college, then started a master's degree for a semester, and then came back and did my last semester of college, and then went back to Harvard Med and finished the last three semesters of my master's degree. It was a very atypical pathway that needed a lot of sign offs from a lot of different people, and that would not have been possible without their support. They believed in me, advocated for me, and gave me that opportunity.

Building a Career in Medicine, Life Beyond Harvard

On to Vanderbilt

Going into medical school, I always knew that I wanted to do something involving the care of trauma patients. Med school was similar to my experience stepping onto Harvard in that I had this idea of what being a physician was like, but then in reality it was quite different. I walked in a little bit blind and so I had to learn a lot about what it means to be a physician, but I think Vanderbilt did a really good job of helping me and students like me along that path.

Over the course of medical school, I gained experience in emergency medicine and general surgery. I came in thinking I was going to do general surgery trauma, so I ended up doing a lot of research in diverticulitis. Then I realized that wasn't going to be the path for me. A couple of older medical students and mentors pointed me in the direction of orthopedic surgery, and I started doing that. Immediately, I fell in love with it. There were many things about practicing orthopedic surgery that I found to be similar to my experience playing water polo. Of all the specialties and all the rotations I had been on, it was by far the most team-focused, which is something that is important to me and helps keep the job fun, and keeps you wanting to come back.

With burnout being such a huge issue in medicine among physicians, finding something that you want to keep coming back to with people that you want to be around and and enjoy spending time with is huge. I also liked the more biomechanical focus of orthopedics. You're restoring function for people, which can be really meaningful. Seeing that restoration of function is really powerful and something that I appreciated a lot. And as someone that enjoyed kinematics, physics, and building things using my hands, it's a very tactile specialty. It's a specialty where you need to think about the structure of the construct that you're using, how it relates to the patient's anatomy, and how it relates to the fracture that you're treating. No two patients are the same and therefore you can't take the exact same approach for every single patient.

Masters Water Polo:

A medical or surgical residency is extremely busy and is challenging both physically and mentally. As I got to my third year of residency I really wanted to try to reconnect with the sport and I finally got a little more time to do so. To me, playing masters water polo is a way to have fun. It's an outlet. It's a way to stay connected to a sport that I love, and it's a way to have a community outside the hospital. Surprisingly enough, St. Louis has a very robust water polo scene. I didn't recognize it at first, but one of the first Harvard water polo All-Americans was from St. Louis; Mike Zimmerman, who's still around and still involved in the water polo community here in St. Louis.

Alumnus Reflections

The Significance of Team

There are two things about Harvard that I miss in particular. The first are the conversations with people. Harvard is a place where you have an extremely high concentration of brilliant people, and having the opportunity to interact with them, to learn from them, and to discuss ideas and concepts and philosophies and hot button issues of the day, was a really awesome way to grow my horizons, to learn more about the world and become a better and more thoughtful version of myself.

The second thing – I definitely miss the team aspect of Harvard Water Polo. Everybody talks about how important it is to be a team. I know that’s the case in healthcare. For example, in the hospital we are always talking about the care team. We talk about how good patient care is team-based patient care. However, I can also say that no team I have been on since graduating has come close to the level of camaraderie that we had on the Harvard water polo team, especially in 2016. I still use that team as a model of what team means when I'm working with people professionally or in the hospital.

Ten years later, that's what my reference point is for when I'm trying to figure out if we're working well as a team or not. But the moments that made that team are hard to replicate outside of the Harvard environment. The bus rides, the practices, the time spent in the dining hall and after practice in the training room. Hanging out, having fun, being friends, being teammates. It's so hard to replicate that. It's probably impossible to replicate that after graduating, and so that's something that I definitely wish I could go back and experience again.

A Harvard Couple

I also have to thank Harvard for introducing me to my wife, Oksana Moscoso, class of 2017. We met in my junior (her sophomore) year of college, and she has had a huge impact on who I am. Harvard helped bring us together.