If at First......

Whoever said you had to be six feet tall to play women's basketball? No one who knew senior Denise D. Williamson, a short and jovial senior who led the women's basketball teams for the past four years.

Coming from a high school team in Memphis which used six players on a team, Denise tried out for Harvard basketball without ever having "shot a basketball before in my life." On the junior varsity her freshman year, Williams tore her right knee ligament in the middle of the season. She only saw action a few times but says her play improved steadily towards the end of the season. Denise says that some "would question their career in basketball" after a season like that, "but not me. I love the sport."

She made varsity her junior year, only to become a "bench warmer in a real way." That season, Williams said she herself played much better but that the team, plagued by size problems and absenteeism, never got on track.

Managing her academics with her basketball was always difficult for Williamson, but the doctor-to-be always got the work done. During freshman and sophomore years she also played viola for the Harvard/Radcliffe orchestra and violin for the Kuumba Singers. Williamson adds she also was politically active in protests against divestiture in South Africa, and in favor of the Afro-American Studies department, a Third World Center, and women's studies. The political climate at Harvard has calmed down significantly in the last two years, she says, enabling her to focus on her studies and her hoop.

Williamson has played an active role in the development of women's athletics at Harvard, serving as an executive member of the new Harvard/Radcliffe Foundation for Women's Athletics, helping start an active "friends group" to donate funds which have transformed the j.v. program from "a poor cousin to varsity" to a team with nicer uniforms, better coaching, and a longer schedule.

Although Williamson "loved how different everyone was" at Harvard, she adds "there is some unspoken but definitely present pressure to conform to the Jonathon P. Higgonbottom III world. I think here and in the world in general, Harvard has been put on some kind of pedestal. I know I did," Williamson says, adding, "Harvard is a grand place, but it is a microcosm of the world and there's a lot of bad stuff too."

But Williamson isn't bitter about Harvard; she wants to hang around Cambridge and go the the I.A.B. and play pick up "with the fellas."