A recruiting visit to Swarthmore College isn’t at all like a recruiting visit to, say, Arizona or Duke. Swarthmore’s five-star recruits don’t average 20 points per game; they average 4.0 in the classroom. Swarthmore isn’t looking for prep All-Americans, it is looking for class valedictorians.
Swarthmore, which advertises itself as “an endless intellectual buffet,” accepts 7 percent of about 14,000 yearly enrollment applicants.
This did not intimidate Amphitheater High School senior Mi Meh, who helped the Panthers girls’ basketball team break a 21-year streak of losing seasons and somehow, on a tennis team short on numbers, finish 10-3, qualifying for the state championship doubles competition.
“Mi is fearless,” says Amphi coach Tom Danehy. “Absolutely fearless.”
Meh laughs when her coach says she is fearless. “I was literally shaking when I walked onto the court,” she remembers. “But we didn’t back down.”
At the year-end Arizona Interscholastic Association Gala Sunday night in Glendale, Meh will sit on a stage in 63,000-seat State Farm Stadium, home of the NFL Arizona Cardinals. She is one of three finalists for the AIA’s Girls Scholar-Athlete of the Year award. As you might imagine, the competition to become one of the three finalists among more than 130 schools makes winning a state tennis championship seem like a piece of cake.
“My parents are kind of in disbelief,” says Meh, a force of personality squeezed into a diminutive 5-foot frame who is an American success story and then some.
She didn’t begin to play sports until she was a teenager. “I was very shy. My first goal was to learn English,” she says. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve done.”
Mi Meh
Meh’s family fled genocide in Myanmar a year or so before Mi was born. They left their village in the middle of the night, escaping into Thailand before invading soldiers pillaged their town. A few years later, the United Nations assisted Meh’s family in a move to Phoenix; they soon relocated to Tucson. Her father works in a grocery store.
The Meh family thrives.
Mi’s older sister, Bu, is majoring in pharmaceutical science at the UA. Her older brother, Lu, is majoring in mechanical engineering at ASU. Mi plans to major in engineering at Swarthmore.
Somehow, Mi found time to play three years of soccer before switching to basketball and tennis at Amphi, helping to create success and pride in two sports at which the Panthers had struggled for decades.
“When we got to the state tennis tournament in Phoenix, some of the AIA people sort of gave us the, ‘Do you really belong here?’ look,” says Danehy. “We lost to Cactus Shadows but we put up a fight. It’s the same kind of mentality we had when we beat Sahuaro for the first time anyone can remember.”
None of this came easily. Last summer, Meh and her doubles teammate, Leilani Ioane, would be at the tennis courts at 5:30 a.m., to work on their games. In basketball, Amphi captured the region championship, winning 20 games, which just about ranks as the upset of the year in Tucson prep sports. What made it more impressive was that Amphi competes in Class 4A, the same classification as undefeated state champion Salpointe Catholic and annual Tucson powerhouses Sahuaro and Pueblo.
“I love Mi’s intensity,” says Danehy, who has been a girls basketball coach in Tucson for 30 years. “She plays defense. She gets in your face.”
To attract the AIA’s attention for the coveted Scholar-Athlete Award — winners will receive $5,000 — Meh did a lot more than play in-your-face defense and approach tennis with similar tenacity.
She is a violinist in the Amphi orchestra. She is an academic mentor to freshmen students. She works in the school’s STEP program, is a volunteer for campus-wide projects, and is active in Link, which does community service projects. More? Meh is active on the student council and does a podcast with fellow honor student Yousef Sengal.
No wonder she felt confident enough to apply for scholarships to Swarthmore, MIT and Cal Tech.
“I didn’t know how prestigious Swarthmore was until I flew to Pennsylvania for my visit,” says Meh. “I’ll be challenged academically, and I love that. I’ll also try to play on a club team when I get there.”
Danehy, whose facial expression shines when he talks about Meh, nodded his head.
“If you get to coach a person like Mi, you are very fortunate,” he says. “ I don’t want to be a jinx, but I really believe that she deserves to win that AIA Award at the Gala on Sunday.”
