“We started to learn a lot of new stuff here when I got here,” Loring says. “Zar would pick up the teaching faster than any of the other kids, any of the kids who were better than him physically, who were stronger than him...So all of a sudden, you see Zar out there against [junior cornerback] Matt Hanson, some of the other starters, and he’s using the new technique better than the older guys.”

“It really set an example for the kids who are going to be playing in the Harvard-Yale game and all the big games from the standpoint of seeing it on film first,” he adds.

And for Zavala’s part, he credits football with teaching him some important lessons.

“As a walk-on, you start off significantly behind everybody else, and it’s really embarrassing,” he says. “You get beat, day in and day out, and it’s tiring on your mind, tiring on your body, and that’s all freshman year. So I think the fact that I was able to stick with it and get better enough to where it got fun to be at practice was really the reason why I was able to stay.”

That perseverance helped Zavala navigate a challenging fall in which he had to balance football, work on his senior thesis, and scholarship applications. After being encouraged to consider the Rhodes by both his freshman proctor and his Kirkland tutors, Zavala took their advice and went for it.

“[A tutor] said, ‘You are an ideal candidate. You definitely, definitely owe it to yourself to apply,’” he says. “And throughout the whole process, I was really thinking, ‘I’m not losing at all by applying to this.’ So it was never ‘if I don’t get it, I wasted my time.’ It was always, ‘I’m learning a lot about myself and about how to apply for competitive things throughout it.’”

By the time the football season ended, Zavala had the Rhodes in hand—and was also named a Marshall Scholar, which he turned down.

But the wideout acknowledges that the individual honor was made possible by his team.

“I can’t even describe what it was like,” he says of his teammates’ support. “Everyone knew I was applying...and they knew I was going to get it. They had more faith in me than I did...To hear from them, just constantly, from the coaches and from the players, saying ‘We know you’re going to get it,’ that was extremely important.”

And his teammates were there every step of the way—including in celebration.

“When he found out about the Rhodes, the fact that the kids who were all of our starters and our players wanted to go and run up to him and congratulate him on that achievement—more so than probably even celebrating the win over Yale—was just a testament to how much the kids really love him, how much they care about him and appreciate him on the team,” Loring says.

With the book closed on his football career, Zavala can focus on new adventures—completing his thesis, his June wedding, and the next two years in England, where he plans to study clinical neurology with the ultimate goal of becoming a neurosurgeon.

But even if his name didn’t appear on many stat sheets, Zavala has left a lasting imprint on the Harvard program.

“We’re walk-ons, and it’s not the playing time we’re there for,” Driscoll says. “But I think it’s seeing somebody who is there because he loves football, and not for PT or glory—not that anybody else is. But I’d like to think that the other guys see Zar and see a guy who reminds them of why they play—who’s there because he loves football.”

—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.