HESS YNTEMA

Just about every year now a new crop of swimmers arrives in the Yard set on rewriting the Harvard record books, and if you take a quick glance down the list of University records posted at Blodgett Pool you can see that many of them have been successful. No Harvard swimming record is more than three years old. None, that is except those held by Hess Ynetma.

Harvard's premier swimmer in the early 1970s and the top butterflyer in the school's history, the Albuquerque, N.M. resident still holds the University record in both the 100-yd. and 200-yd. butterfly. Yntema is also the only Harvard swimmer ever to take home four gold medals from the Eastern Seaboard Championships. In 1974 he won both of the butterfly events and the 200-yd. freestyle and swam the anchor leg on the winning 800-yd. freestyle relay.

After his junior year, Yntema took time off to participate in an exchange program that sent him to Medellin, Colombia. During his three years there he taught English and helped coach the national team but gave up competitive swimming himself. An anthropology major at Harvard, Yntema saw his Colombian trip as a chance to pick up another language and culture first hand. "I had been to other places before," he said, "but never long enough to really understand them. I wanted to understand a foreign country in a formal wry."

With three years in South America behind him. Yntema found it somewhat difficult to return to Cambridge. But in the fall of 1978 he came back for his last year and found the time he spent living in Kirkland House Master's Residence "not intolerable by any means."

Now a first-year law student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, the former Crimson great has taken to the water again to swim for the local A.A.U. team, the Lobo Aquatic Club. Out of training for three and one-half years, Yntema began serious workouts again in late 1979. Then, with only about nine months of hard training behind him, he entered the A.A.U. Senior Nationals this past summer and finished fifteenth in his old specialty, the 200-yd. butterfly.

Asked what he thought about his school records still standing, the butterflyer seemed mildly surprised and generously wished the best of luck to anybody here now with a chance at breaking them.