Declining J.V. Program Hurts Crimson Soccer

The Harvard junior varsity soccer program is quickly nearing extinction.

There is no recognizable squad which can fulfill its necessary function in the Harvard soccer program and there have been few efforts to maintain the unit.

This fact was well evidenced this year: the team had no practices of its own this fall, it has no field of its own, and did not win a single game all season. Further, and probably most importantly, there is almost no coaching time devoted to the training of JV soccer players and the development of their soccer skills.

The result, not unexpectedly, is a gap in the middle of the soccer program. "The whole thing is so discontinuous," complained assistant varsity coach Rick Scott last week about the lack of a program to bring freshman players up to the level of varsity soccer. "Junior varsity is like quicksand," Vinnie Steponaitis, former manager of the team, said.

There is, then, nowhere for those players who played freshman soccer but who were not able to make the quantum leap to the varsity team to go. For these players the soccer program no longer provides a means of training players, of spending the time and effort to mold this talent into a unit, or of allowing them to discover the extent of their potential.

In such a system, it follows that when a player comes to Cambridge and does not already have varsity level skills, either by virtue of an exceptional high school program or a European childhood, he cannot hope to develop those skills here. Asked about this situation, Steve Kidder, this year's captain, said, "At Harvard, if you haven't got it, you don't get it."

Because so many of these players are discouraged from playing by this system, there is very little consistent transferral of skilled players to the varsity. With this continual decline in the roster of the whole program there develops a serious lack of bench strength.

By the middle of this season, the problem of bench strength became acute. Felix Adedeji became injured, Bent Hinze and Dragan Vujovic returned to Europe last year, Jean-Pierre Gilbert of Luxembourg quit after the Penn game, and Crimson head coach Bruce Munro could find very few healthy and talented bodies to fill in.

"Without an abundance of talent, the injuries we got crippled the talent we did have," Kidder said.

The lack of talent--which is brought up through the system from the freshman team--means the program must rely more and more on foreign players. This is an additive process: the success of foreign players has brought about the neglect of the junior varsity; this neglect results in an even greater reliance on this fragile group of foreign talent, and so on.

The neglect, or de-emphasis, of the junior varsity is due also to the failure of the assigned JV coach, Seamus Malin, to devote his energies to this program. "Seamus simply has not been able to establish enough time to teach players," Kidder said in explanation.

Evidently, the Athletic Department is unwilling to hire a full-time JV coach. Also, Seamus Malin prefers to think of himself as an assistant varsity coach, essentially a duplication of the position held by Rick Scott. As a result, there was considerable confusion this season about which coach held which position, about which coach would be on the field at any given practice, and about which players would work with which coach.

This problem is compounded by the fact that Malin wears many hats at Harvard. In addition to his job as JV soccer coach, he is the Director of Financial Aid, a member of the admissions committee, a freshman advisor and an informal advisor to foreign students.

Malin yesterday explained his position as "more of a problem on paper than it is in reality," and described involvement of coaches in the admissions process in the Ivy League as a "fact of life."

"At this point he's just too busy to coach full-time, and what we need is a full-time coach," Rick Scott said about Malin's time commitments.

In addition, the particular way in which Malin's responsibilities overlap suggests questions of conflict of interest. As a coach he has the job of scouting for and attracting the best soccer talent to Harvard; his other work directly involves him in the admission process.

Malin blames the weakness of the JV program on the lack of a separate practice field, and on the success at the varsity level of foreign players in recent years. This success was so great that there was little need to concentrate on developing skills of JV players.

"Teams have just come out of the ground the past few years," Scott said, "and it just can't stay that way."