NCAA Seeds Harvard 3rd in Soccer Playoffs; Crimson to Face Brown in Opening Round

Con Ed does not have a monopoly on brown-outs. The Harvard soccer team, thanks to the NCAA tournament seedings released yesterday, will be seeing brown twice in the next week. Following a key Ivy League clash with Brown this Saturday in Cambridge, the Crimson squad will travel to Providence, R.I., a week from today to battle the Bruins in the opening round of the New England district playoffs.

The NCAA selection committee awarded Harvard the number-three seed in the tourney, which means that they will play the number-two team, Brown. The University of Connecticut, which is the only team to defeat Brown this season, nabbed the number-one spot, and will play Bridgeport, the fourth seed.

Four Selected

The NCAA selects the top four University Division teams from its weekly New England College Coaches Soccer Poll for the tourney. UConn has been on top of the poll for the last three weeks, moving into the spot Brown had occupied since the beginning of the year. Harvard was rated fourth in last week's poll, behind College Division Springfield, while Bridgeport ranked at the number-eight spot behind Keene State, Babson and WPI, all small colleges.

Harvard's last trip to the NCAAs came in 1972, when Bruce Munro's squad advanced to the quarter-final round of the national championships. The Crimson slipped past the University of Rhode Island in the first game, 1-0, then went on to edge Brown in overtime to capture the New England district title.

The road to a national crown, however, was blocked in Ithaca, N.Y., on December 3, as Cornell eliminated Harvard, 2-0, in the quarter-finals. The Big Red went on to the semi-finals in Miami.

Brown rebounded from its second-round defeat in 1972 to go all the way to the semi-finals last season. While the Crimson squad was suffering one of its worst seasons in a long while, the Bruins took three overtime contests against UConn, Yale and Hartwick before bowing out to St. Louis, 3-1.