RUTTED TRACK

Last week-end, the Crimson track team gave a last desperate tug at its belt, gritted its teeth, and struck out for the hills. It was heading for Hanover and a dual meet with the Indians--its man power a mockery of Harvard's real running-strength. There had even been suggestions that the squad call off the meet, so low had team-morale sunk, so poor was the performance predicted for a half-manned team. But the squad decided to go ahead and do its best. When they returned victorious, the trackmen were almost as surprised as the sports writers. For track at Harvard is in a rut this spring.

The complaint is not with the coaching of Jaakko Mikkola nor with a disappointing season of continual losses. There is only one source of the track team's troubles, one problem which must be solved before they can be cured. A schedule sprawled out over the whole year with meets scattered arbitrarily through fall, winter, and spring, a schedule which eliminates any real track "season," keeps the trackmen at the lonely drudgery of practise from September until June. The only hypodermic for the team's sagging morale will be a revision of this schedule, and provision for an invigorating, carefully planned season in the spring which will bring the whole squad out together for a united effort in the major meets.

The recently established Quadrangular Meet would have to go, and so would the other indoor competitions that dot the winter months. The necessary change is not an easy one. But the gaps can be filled by additional dual meets with Princeton and Cornell in the spring. And the sacrifice by a few individual performers whom the HAA has been sending to Madison Square Garden at considerable expense cannot be avoided. If Harvard is to make the most of its coach and its material, it must wield the knife with unflinching decision now, in the hope that it may restore the health and self-respect of the Crimson track team in the future.