It's academic: Harvard was tops in the field

It was a year that never should have been. Or at least never should have been so good.

Because last fall, the prospects of Harvard's athletic squad's ever matching the feats of the year before were slim and none. And slim had graduated a few months before.

Gone were a slew of athletes many considered the finest in Harvard history and with them, the most Ivy championships ever won by one school in one year.

Yet, somewhere, somehow, last year's Harvard no-names became the big names of the Ivy League. Between the Harvard football squad's second straight Ivy title in the fall and the Harvard women's tennis team's second straight Ivy title in the spring, nine other Crimson squads wreaked havoc on the league like only one set of teams before them. And those teams had played their games in Cambridge the year before.

The Crimson program that in 1982-1983 set an Ivy record with 12 league titles, last year put its name in the books as the second most sucessful Ivy show ever.

And considering the early-season prospects, he 11 league crowns seem as impressive as the 10 of the year before.

But certainly everyone's taking notice of the dramatic upswing in Harvard athletics, including the dean of the college. "The last few years have been as strong a period for Harvard athletics as we've had in a long time," says John B. Fox Jr. '59.

What separated last year from the others, though, was the position in which the 1983-1984 squads started. If the championship squads of two years ago had the skill and talent in common, then last year's teams had finesse and charisma. Some of the more remarkable feats:

* The football team tied one of the worst in the league, Cornell, 3-3, lost to Dartmouth for the fifth straight year and came within seconds of losing at Brown. So is it little wonder that the squad that lost 31 lettermen from the 1982 Ivy championship squad was one of the biggest surprises to win a league crown? Actually, the team settled for its second straight tie for the title, but a 16-7 victory over Yale in the 100th meeting between the two schools erased any pain that the tie caused.

* The men's sailing team came out of nowhere, filled with nobodies and beat everybody to cop the 1983 crown. "We lost everyone from the year before," Coach Mike Horn says. "We really surprised ourselves."

* The men's swimming team was pretty surprised itself, when Navy and Columbia beat the Crimson on successive days. The defeat at Navy broke a 32-meet winning streak and the loss at Columbia dropped Harvard's seven-year mark to 58-3. But somehow, the aquamen managed to tie for the Eastern league crown and, in top form by season's end, eked out their sixth consecutive Eastern Seaboard title.

* National runners-up the year before, the men's hockey team never demonstrated the power of 1982-1983, but still managed a tie with Cornell for the league crown.

* The baseball squad, picked to run in the back of the pack, became the darlings of the Eastern League, racking up a second straight title and a trip to the NCAA Regional.

* Perhaps the only squad that did as well as anyone expected was the men's squash team, which racked up yet another Ivy title while going 10-0.

* The women's cross country team out-distanced the competition at the Heptagonals to become the only women's squad to cop a crown in the fall.

* The Howe-Cup went to Yale, but the Ivy title went to Cambridge for the first time in the women's squash team's history.

* The women's lightweight crew team completed it most successful season ever with a win at the Eastern Sprints, but not before the defending titlist, Smith, put a scare into the Radcliffe champs.

* The women's lacrosse team--minus two All-Americans and five All-Ivy players from a year before--dropped its season opener and was immediately written off by many observers, but proceeded to go on a 12-game winning streak and recorded its fourth straight Ivy title.

* The women's tennis team managed its second straight Ivy title and its first outright, downing Princeton in the squad's last match of the year.

This article is reprinted from the 1984 Commencement issue of The Harvard Crimson