Moving in the Right Direction

For the four years that Frank Sullivan has been coach of Harvard's men's basketball team, the team's mantra has been: "we're movin' in the right direction."

Loss after loss would be met with a shrug and that phrase, as if a positive attitude could compensate for a lack of size inside and an inability to run a tight, clean-working offense.

This season, however, the team (9-17 overall, 5-9 Ivy) could finally justify saying those words. Although it did not win the league championship--its sixth-place finish wasn't even close--it made serious gains in player development, laying a strong foundation for future seasons.

"Our goal, of course, is to win ball games, and while we didn't do that as much as we had wanted, we're pleased with the season," senior Annikar Chhabra says. "So many players stepped up for us at different times in the season. It was a complete team effort."

In a sense, the team can be said to have been saved by low expectations. Coming into the season, the Crimson was faced with the prospect of having to make-do with a mess of supporting players. The team had lost star forward Tyler Rullman to graduation, and his 19.5 points per game and solid, hole-plugging defense inside were not to be replaced overnight.

Surprisingly, though, the team managed to compensate. Paced by the leadership of point guard Tarik Campbell (7.2 points per game, 164 assists), the surprising inside play of sophomore forwards Darren Rankin (12.3 ppg) and Mike Gilmore (10.8 ppg), and the solid all-around performance of freshman phenom Kyle Snowden, the team matched and even surpassed the play of the 1992-93 squad.

The improvement was particularly evident in the first few weeks of the season. Getting off to one of its best starts in recent years, the team won four of its first six, beating Babson (67-62), St. Francis (77-52), Lehigh (71-70) and Dartmouth (67-66).

But then the Crimson hit a rough stretch, which was more a reflection of its competition than any serious drop-off in performance level. The team got soundly beaten by Hartford (85-67); trounced by Penn (92-76), who would later make it to the second round of the NCAA tournament; destroyed by long-time league power Princeton (70-47); and narrowly beaten by a good Fairfield team (87-82).

But then on January 15, Harvard began the second half of its season with a win over Dartmouth (79-69) and then won two of its next five, beating Brown (62-57), and a very good Columbia team (76-75).

The February 13 Columbia win ushered in one of the best three-game periods in recent memory. After beating the Lions, the Crimson lost a close battle to Princeton at home (63-52), and then played even With Penn (losing, 66-65) in cleary its best performance of the season.

The team's intensity seemed to fall off considerably in the last two games of the season, losses to Brown (65-60) and Yale (72-67), but by then the verdict was out: the Crimson had improved significantly.

"I am extremely proud of the way we played--particularly in the middle of the season," Chhabra says. "It showed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that we are moving in the right direction."