Winning Harriers Try For Heptagonal Crown

The Harvard cross country team will try to add the Heptagonal Crown to the glories of its first undefeated season in ten years at New York's Van Courtland Park this afternoon.

Fresh from a clutch win over Princeton and Yale in last week's Big Three Meet, Harvard will run against the seven other Ivy schools, Army, and defending champion Navy. Coach Bill McCurdy rates the Cadets and the Midshipmen as the biggest challenges to a Harvard win with Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Penn outside shots.

Junior Doug Hardin, individual champion in the Big Three affair, and the wiry English captain Jim Baker both have good shots at first place. But Yale's Frank Shorter, Brown's Chip Ennis, Army's Camp and Navy's Dare should provide strong challenges.

Could Be Trouble

"Our chances of winning pretty much depend on what Tim McLoone, Dick Howe, Bob Stempson and John Heyburn do," McCurdy said Wednesday. "If they finish well--from 10-20--then we're in good shape. But if they get stuck in the pack, we could be in trouble."

Returning from last year's championship Navy team are the aforementioned Dare, Knode, Foulsham and Wallace. Fifth man is Gafney, a senior who didn't start in the Heps last year.

Cadet Camp paces the West Pointers, but in a meet against Cornell last weekend, the best he could do was second against a Big Red squad which lost the first four places to Harvard in a meet early this season. Army won the race, it should be mentioned, by sweeping places two through nine.

McCurdy got a letter Wednesday from Dave McLean, captain of the 1956 Harvard cross country team, the last to win the Heps. "It's about time you guys started to do something. Good luck," he wrote.

If Harvard can put on a good show today, then this team, which has managed to keep winning despite crippling injuries which at one time had five of the top seven men on the sideline, will have to rate a good shot at the IC4A's Noc. 20.