Golfers Driving Toward Ivy League Crown

Harvard has a golf team. Bet most of you didn't know that.

It must be pretty bad if you haven't heard much about it, eh?

No, actually we have a pretty darn good golf team.

In fact, the Crimson, which competes in both the fall and spring, finished among the top 10 in a field of 150 teams at the ECAC tournament this fall.

So what can we expect from the Crimson golfers this spring?

"This is one of our best team's in recent memory," Tri-Captain Ross Cockrell said. "We did very well this fall, the best Harvard has done since the 1970s."

The team has not always been this successful, however. Tri-Captain Andy Chao spoke of the team's play last spring as disappointing, especially considering the talent the squad possessed.

But if this fall is any indication of what to expect this spring, the Crimson are very talented and focused.

Swing Low...

Golf is a little different than most other sports. At the tournaments, five men travel but only the four lowest scores are counted in the team score, while at matches, where fewer than three teams compete seven men play and the top five are counted in the total.

The team's top seven players look to be its three captains--junior Chao, and seniors Cockrell and Mike Foster--as well as juniors Robert Kincaid, David Miller, Dennis Murphy and freshman Lou Body.

The necessity of determining the top seven so early in the season is that only these players will be on the team's spring break trip out West. These lucky golfers will be heading to California to the famous links of Pebble Beach for a week.

But it will be a fairly rigorous schedule for the travelers. These days afford the team its only practice before the season begins. Cold weather and wet conditions make practices very limited here in New England.

Junior Bill Boone and sophomore Joe Scornavacchi round out the squad, but they will not have a chance to crack the top seven until practice resumes after spring break.

The team's first contest after its stint in the West will be the Harvard-Princeton-Yale match in New Haven just four days after its return home. Hardly an easy way to start off, this may be the most important match of the season. These Ivy foes are typically the strongest non-scholarship schools in the East and both of these squads narrowly defeated the Crimson at ECAC's.

"It should be a tough battle for the Ivies between us three," Cockrell said.

Kincaid had a very good fall season and Foster is back with the team after going abroad spring semester last year. In addition, Body compiled an impressive high school record and should help the team even though he was available for only one match before hockey took him away from the course in the fall.