Harvard Sports: Look-ins and Zig-outs

Facilities

Harvard has a lot of athletic facilities. Some are good, some are not so good. Almost all are pretty old.

Harvard Stadium is the colossus of the University's athletic facilities. Built around the turn of the century, the Stadium has a capacity of around 40,000.

The Stadium has some historical significance in that it is the oldest concrete-supported stadium in America. At one time a bowl, it was reduced to its present horseshoe shape in the 1930s. Temporary stands are moved into the open end of the Stadium for the Dartmouth and Yale games.

Harvard Stadium is a fine place to watch a football game. Sight lines are excellent, considered to be among the best in the country, and there's barely a bad seat in the house.

The only drawback to the Stadium are the hard, cold, backless concrete seats which can be a real pain in the ass in November.

Watson Rink is the only ice skating facility in the University. Though Watson is relatively old as hockey arenas go, it has one of the hardest and best ice surfaces in the East. Small (seating capacity is only 1900) even by college standards, Watson is a cozy, noisy, and enjoyable place to watch hockey, so long as you can stand the freezing temperatures inside the arena. Watson is reputed to be the second coldest rink in the East, next to Vermont's.

The big problem with Watson is that, being the only ice skating rink in the University, its use by undergraduates is limited. The Harvard teams, intramurals leagues, graduate schools, and local high schools, all skate at Watson, resulting in little accessibility for the general student body, and only then at inconvenient hours.

The Indoor Athletic Building is the busiest indoor facility at Harvard, but, sad to say, it also is so antiquated that it needs to be replaced more desperately than any facility in the University.

The main gym looks like something out of a small Midwestern high school, with one official size basketball court and two smaller adjacent ones. The stands are of the fold-down variety and hold about 1000.

The swimming pool is also poor, so bad that two years ago the Penn divers refused to compete because they considered the pool too shallow for safety.

A bunch of minor sports are played in the IAB--wrestling, fencing, and volleyball among them.

But the IAB's greatest use comes from undergraduate intramural and general activity. Many of the individual athletic programs are conducted there, such as karate, weightlifting, and scuba diving lessons.

The basketball courts are always open, but they are so popular and so few in number that they're obsolete for a college Harvard's size.

Harvard had at one time the best track facility in New England--the Bubble, a structure supported by air. But when an air blower blew out two years ago, the Bubble collapsed, and Harvard had to resort back to Briggs Cage. Briggs is probably the worst indoor college track in the East if not the universe, and the less said about it the better. A personal inspection should suffice.

Harvard does have excellent facilities in two areas, crew and squash. The Harvard crew rows out of Newell Boathouse. Built around the 1890s, the Victorian-style edifice has lost much of its aristocratic splendor, although a semblance of its former elegance is still discernible.

Weld Boathouse is what the Radcliffe crew calls home, and is also the intramural docking place. Each House has its own crew and boat, and there are sculls and wherries, with instruction for individual rowers, which can be a nice way to enjoy a warm fall or spring day on the Charles.

Squash courts are in adequate abundance. The varsity squad has its own courts at Hemenway Gym, leaving the University courts near Adams House, and the Dunster and Lowell courts are available for the rest of the students and intramurals.

The Palmer-Dixon courts are Harvard's indoor tennis courts, but there are only two of them, and needless to say the varsity has preference in the winter.

There are a slew of outdoor courts in the area next to Palmer-Dixon, but they aren't the greatest, and the winds blowing across Soldiers Field often make them unsuitable even in good weather.

The other major area for intramural and intercollegiate competition is the area behind the stadium. Soldiers Field. The baseball and lacrosse teams play here, as do the Radcliffe lacrosse and field hockey teams. All outdoor intramural sports--football, soccer, and baseball--are held here.

In addition to these official facilities, there are other less formal places to pursue one's athletic interests. Harvard Yard and the Charles River banks are fine for frisbee, touch football, and suntanning. The Freshman Union is the mecca for pingpong, pool, and that most addictive and time wasting of all endeavors, pinball.

In general, Harvard's facilities are hardly befitting a University with the largest endowment in the country, especially in the area of undergraduate use, and especially when compared to sports complexes like Princeton's and Boston College's. Harvard falls far short of the ideal of mens sana in corpore sano one would expect of a liberal arts institution.

Fortunately however, plans are underway to build a new sports complex that should alleviate many of the problems that now exist. The project might be realized by the time the class of '79 is ready to graduate.

Intramurals

Entering freshman will find one of the best intramural programs in the country at Harvard, in terms of variety, participation and organization.

"Our program is unique," said Floyd Wilson, director of intramural athletics, "because there's a separate program for freshmen. This enables the freshmen to meet and become friendly with other freshmen. A lot of the proctors participate, and this gives the students a chance to get close to them. Also the competition among freshman dormitories does a lot for freshman spirit."

Although the amount of time for intramurals is limited by the high demand for facilities, there are still so many different sports offered that a freshman should be able to do something of an athletic nature at least three times a week.

Women, now that they are in sufficient numbers in the Yard, play in all but the heavy contact sports.

"We have increased the participation of women over the last couple of years," Wilson said, "and right now we have some special events solely for girls. Also, if there is a demand by women for something in a particular area we try to meet it. We're trying to change the program and meet the needs and wishes of the girls."

An often unnoticed but widely appreciated part of the Harvard intramural set-up is the individual athletics program. If you haven't been able to suit your needs and desires through the freshman intramural or intercollegiate programs, you'll almost certainly find something here. Activities, with instructors and group leaders, range from different styles of karate to pistol-shooting to horseback riding.

Star Jockdom

The Ivy League has a bad reputation because of its low quality football, but in virtually every sport some Ivy team, often Harvard's, can keep up with any college in the U.S. last year. Harvard had Ivy champion in football, hockey, lightweight crew, and national champions in heavyweight crew and squash.

Harvard teams last year sported a .668 winning percentage against Ivy teams, and a .665 percentage overall, both best in the Ivy League.

The three major sports at Harvard are football, hockey and crew in the fall, winter, and spring respectively.

These are the "major" sports because of the number of people that play them, the money spent on them, the fact that all three still maintain freshman and junior varsity squads, and the amount of attention and interest given to these sports by the students and alumni.

For a freshman, making the first team in any of these three sports is quite an accomplishment. Football attracts a large number of ex-high school standouts among its 100-150 candidates each fall.

Though nobody is every officially cut from the football team, attrition usually dwindles the number sticking it out to the end of the year to about 50. Because of the number of people, and the short amount of time that coaches have to form a team, people with the biggest buildups and credentials get the most attention, and the also-rans get overlooked.

The story of one freshman quarterback who was an All-City quarterback in Detroit should serve as an example. "I would come to practice every day. Apparently the coaches hardly even looked at me. Some guy from Miami had bigger credentials, and he got all their attention. It was then that I decided I had better things to do with my time, so I quit after the first week." The "guy from Miami" was Jim Stoeckel, who went on to set a number of Harvard quarterback records.

Hockey is perhaps the most competitive sport at Harvard because of the large number of top-quality players Harvard has, top-quality enough to rank Harvard second in the nation last year, and a perennial ECAC tournament qualifier.

Harvard's JV team could have beaten at least half of Harvard's varsity opponents last year. So unless you happen to be very good at it, forget about playing hockey at Harvard.

It is said that crew is the last masochistic sport left at Harvard. It is also about the only sport where prior experience in rowing is not a prerequisite to making the varsity. As a matter of fact, 75 per cent of Harvard rowers never touched an oar before coming here.

The only trouble is there are about 100 candidates each year for both the heavy and light freshmen crews. As with football, this number dwindles considerably after the freshman get a look-see at nine-month rigors of rowing and training.

All the other sports at Harvard can be lumped together and termed as minor--including basketball. A few squads can be reached by freshmen with little experience, such as squash, fencing, golf, track and even soccer, if you are willing to put a great deal of effort and determination into it.

Others, such as basketball, swimming, and tennis, can only be played on an intercollegiate level if you played them in high school.

Attitudes

In short, just about any freshman who is willing to work at a specific sport, and has a certain amount of desire and ability, can find his niche in the Harvard sports scene. President Bok is the person most responsible for this since he has seen to it that freshman athletics survive at Harvard even when other schools are cutting them back o save money.

Trying to define an attitude towards athletics among the Harvard student body isn't all that simple. Harvard attracts a wide number of diverse people, so trying to pin a stereotype on the Harvard athletic scene is near impossible.

On the one hand Harvard certainly doesn't fit the image of the Big Ten school--there are no pep rallies before big games or flash card sections in the stands. But on the other hand, Harvard is far from the image that most people attribute to it--that Harvard students are basically unconcerned with their teams and take a very blase attitude toward sports. The answer lies somewhere in between.

For one thing, there is no peer pressure to play sports at Harvard. People don't feel that you let fair Harvard down if you don't compete for it, even if you have the ability. There is a great deal more respect for athletes who turn away from organized sports because they wish to concentrate on becoming a doctor or doing something else.

'Cliffies certainly don't have a reputation for idolising jocks. Many athletes, especially football players even feel there is definite hostility towards them from women at Harvard because of their jockishness. Even though many of the women themselves play sports.

There are several types of people whom one can classify. There are a large number of people at Harvard who couldn't care less about any sports-related activity. They're the ones that are interviewed in libraries on a Saturday in late November about why they aren't watching the Harvard-Yale football game instead.

Then there is another group of people who almost live or die by what their Harvard heroes do. These are the sportswriters and other assorted hacks like certain obsessed alumni.

Then you finally have the great majority of Harvard students who go to the hockey and football games more as a social event than anything else. It's somewhere to bring a date from Wellesley, an excuse to get drunk, or just to watch a roommate.

Getting into any Harvard intercollegiate contest as a spectator is pretty easy. Harvard is about the only college in the country that charges no admission to undergraduate sports events--with the exception of the Dartmouth and Yale football games, when undergrads must pay half price.

Admission to athletic events is gained via a ticket book that is passed out around registration time, and which contains direct admission stubs for football games, and stubs which can be traded in for tickets at the ticket office for hockey and basketball.