The Mail: Soccer and Coaches

To the Sports Editor of The Crimson:

As a one time part-time educational administrator at Harvard, I believe that in most instances alumni objections to University personnel decisions are meddlesome and of little value. I also have little faith in the influence on decision making of letters to public officials or organs on major issues, my fervor having gotten the better of my skepticism on only one other occasion, in a letter to Mr. Rodino after the cancellation of Professor Cox's employment in Washington. There are times, however, as the Cox case, though on a different level, illustrates, when a personnel issue and comments by citizens and alumni are appropriate, if not needed. Proposed, if not already effected, decisions by the Athletic Department regarding the employment of Harvard soccer coaches raise such an issue.

Remarks by coach Munro, published recently in The Crimson, regarding the reasons for his resignation as varsity soccer coach indicate that the values of professional sports, until recently confined at the college level to football or, if in other sports, to other parts of the country, have spread to Harvard soccer. As someone who, in his four years of playing soccer at Harvard in the 1960s, never was on a team that went to the NCAAs, I believe in winning. But I also believe, as do most Harvard soccer alumni I have spoken to, including the most talented, that the values of professionalism, with its recruiting, its exclusion of students who would otherwise normally play, its fielding of players who, as a group, are not representative of the University's students, and its undercutting of the raw joy of playing the sport through its emphasis on winning, are not values that are in the best interests of the Harvard soccer program. Whatever the merits of coach Munro or the other factors in the case, it is a disturbing sign that one of the reasons he gave for his resignation was a recent emphasis on winning and the implied erosion of the values of amateur sports in Harvard athletics.

Another ominous aspect of coach Munro's resignation as varsity coach and appointment as freshman coach is the implication that the services of the present freshman coach, Dana Getchell, will no longer be needed. Letters protesting any release of Coach Getchell have been flooding the Department of Athletics, and rightly so. The message they are carrying is that there are few teams at Harvard where the best values of intercollegiate athletics have been better or more consistently upheld over the last ten years than on the freshman soccer team. The number of students who stay with freshman soccer through the season is impressive; more impressive, considering the "love of the game" philosophy behind it, is coach Getchell's won-lost record, matched only, perhaps, by Henry Parker.

It would be difficult to defend the release of coach Getchell publicly; to release him surreptitiously or backhandedly would be an admission that his dismissal cannot be justified. He is more needed than ever. Peter John Ames '67