Harvard-Westlake’s Nicole Hung is headed to Princeton by way of Oak Park

Before she entered preschool, Nicole Hung’s family had picked out her university. It would be Stanford, her father’s alma mater.

To get her ready, they took her to watch Stanford’s Rose Bowl appearance against Wisconsin in 2000. And she saw Stanford star Casey Jacobsen’s buzzer-beater against top-ranked Duke later that year at the Pete Newell Challenge.

Hung, 17, a Harvard-Westlake senior, has certainly excelled in the classroom and on the court. She has a 4.2 grade-point average, plays the bassoon in the school symphony and her tennis game is strong enough to play on a Division I team, her coach says.

But it’s on the basketball court where the 5-11 forward commands attention. Hung led her team in scoring (17 points a game) this season, and on Wednesday she poured in 25 points as Harvard-Westlake beat Antelope Valley in a Southern Section Division 4AA quarterfinal playoff game. On Saturday, Harvard-Westlake (28-1) plays Oak Park (19-9) in the semifinals in Sherman Oaks.

In this game, Hung will have to make a lot of key decisions, but she’s already made a harder one.

The Hung family was excited last fall when Stanford’s basketball coach told her that she had been accepted by the university, Hung recalled. Harvard and Princeton also accepted her application.

Then Hung turned her family’s world upside down. She’d fallen in love with the Princeton campus, the university offered her a scholarship and she could play for the Tigers basketball team.

When she picked Princeton over Stanford, her family members were shocked. Tears flowed. “I’ve always done everything they’ve told me to do,� Hung said. “I felt like it was time to do something I wanted to do.�

In her family, preparing for success begins at an early age.

When Hung was 5, she began studying classical piano and started playing basketball. “It sounds a bit anachronistic or sexist now, but I didn’t have any expectations for my daughter to play sports,� said her father, Vincent Hung, a Pasadena plastic surgeon.

But her parents threw their support behind her and hired a private trainer and put her on a club basketball team.

Hung’s game kept developing, but her schedule was often overloaded. She recalls a weekend last year when she had to write a history term paper, take the SAT subject tests, perform in a symphony concert, study for a physics final and play in a club basketball tournament.

Hung’s father helped her study into the wee hours of the morning and when she took naps, he’d wake her up with a gentle touch and a cup of hot tea. “He’s not like, ‘I have these high standards for you and I’m just going to leave you on your own to do them,’ � she said.

When Vincent Hung decided his children should be fluent in Mandarin, he learned the language in his 30s and spoke nothing else in his home during their early years.

“He’s a very, very intense man,� said Nicole Hung. “It’s inspirational.�

His opinion means the world to her, but there was one thing she was not willing to concede.

When she picked Princeton over Stanford, it was her grandfather’s reaction that she feared the most. Herbert Luke, 79, calls himself her No. 1 fan and attended all of her basketball games wearing Harvard-Westlake paraphernalia.

Luke planned to move from Los Angeles to Palo Alto when his granddaughter went to Stanford so he could be close by. After learning she would be moving to the East Coast, he surprised her.

Much to her delight, the next day he put on a Princeton baseball cap, Hung said.

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