Building Crimson Athletic Hopes

Head Coach of Football Timothy L. Murphy's arrival at Harvard in December 1993 was widely heralded as the dawn of a new era. It was 10 years since Harvard's last Ivy championship and eight since its last winning season, and Murphy was hailed as a savior.

Today, in the midst of a dismal season, with Harvard football 1-8 and winless in the Ivy League, many are still waiting for a sign that things are moving in the right direction.

When Murphy was named as the Crimson's head coach, everyone knew rebuilding would take time, but many hoped the longed-for turn around would be sooner.

Upon becoming coach, Murphy overhauled the recruiting program in hopes of building a championship team.

Each year Murphy examines thousands of candidates, who he terms "suspects" because so few of them are realistic recruiting prospects for an Ivy League sports program.

The challenge faces all coaches and administrators in Ivy athletics: How to forge a winning combination out of two small groups--division one athletes and top-flight students?

A Different Ball Game

Although all of the 41 College teams recruit to some degree, football's recruiting program is a different beast--35 football recruits matriculate every year, more than for any other team. Then too, the pool of talented high school football players is enormous.

"We recruit for all our sports, but football is just so much bigger," says John P. Reardon Jr. '60, athletic director from 1978 until 1990 and current director the Harvard Alumni Association.

When Murphy took over, the College's football recruiting program was anachronistic. During the 23-year tenure of previous coach Joseph Restic, coaches seldom visited players and avoided extensive nation-wide searches.

Murphy has increased visits to prospective players, expanded the number of recruits examined and launched nation-wide mailing campaigns to uncover as many prospects as possible.

Although the efforts have yes to show results, many say they expect Murphy's hard work to pay off in future seasons, and the coach himself says he is still two years away from fielding his team.

Still, recruiting is the building block of the team. Even though the only schools Harvard really recruits against are Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and some of the service academics, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find winning combinations of athletic ability and academic aptitude.

Admission Process

The admissions office is very much a part of the recruiting process, particularly at Harvard.

"Each of the 41 sports teams has one person on our staff who acts as a liaison. We ask coaches to provide information on people applying who would make a tremendous difference to that particular sport," Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons '67 says. "We then ask coaches to rank applicants in order of priority and go from there."

The close relationship between admissions officers and coaches ensures that extra attention is paid to recruits' applications--especially those recruits, like a goalie, who would fill key needs on a team.

But although special consideration is given, coaches say even much-wanted players are continually rejected.

This difficulty of finding recruits who can meet admission standards, however, greatly varies by sport.

Coaches and administrators alike say much of this variation is the result of the different backgrounds of players in the various sports.

"You look at men's basketball and where the best players in that sport are coming from, and it is unlikely that you're going to find as wide a pool of qualified applicants as you'll find in women's soccer," says Tim W. Wheaton, the varsity women's soccer coach. "The dominant women's soccer programs around the country come from primarily suburban, affluent, educationally-oriented areas and homes, with kids who would be applying to Harvard even if they didn't play soccer."

As a result, prep-school teams such as squash and crew tend to draw players who combine athletics and academics.

In contrast, sources close to the athletic department say that in his first year here Murphy was constantly frustrated when the admissions office rejected many athletes he considered qualified.

These rejections are not entirely the responsibility of the admissions office. Harvard is constrained in who it can admit in many sports by an Academic Index instituted in the 1980s to combat charges that academic standards for athletes were declining.

"My sense of what was happening in the league was that there was a perception that some schools were cheating," Reardon says. "In a way it was like working In Washington during the Cold War, where you always assumed the worst of the other side and so you lowered your own standards."

The academic index breaks down athletes' standardized test scores and high school class ranks to assure they are above a minimum standard. Each applicant is rated in three categories. SAT I, SAT II (formerly achievement tests) and class rank.

The admissions office averages an applicant's two best SAT I scores, then divides the resulting number by ten. An average score of 1200, for instance, becomes a 60.

The same procedure is applied to the average of applicant's three best SAT II scores and their class rank, which is approximated onto a scale of 1 to 80. The three resulting scores are added together to create an applicant's index.

The highest possible index is 240, and the College average is 210. The minimum index Ivy League schools will accept is 161, although exceptions are sometimes made for students with compelling non-athletic reasons.

"The main idea of the index is that we want to have people who are representative of the student body as a whole," Fitzsimmons says. "What the Ivy League does not want is to have athletes way over their heads. The goal is to have athlete graduation rates representative of college-wide graduation rates."

The academic index extends beyond individual qualifications, and operates on a team-wide basis for football, men's hockey and men's basketball.

Although the 161 baseline still applies to individual players, the hockey and basketball recruits will not be admitted if their scores would cause the team's average to fall below the mean of the College.

This can sometimes result, however, in drastic gaps between players' scores.

Consider the case of Doug M. Sproule '98, a hockey player who scored close to 1500 on his SAT I.

"My scores made the process much easier," Sproule says. "Because my scores allowed me to be above average for the index, letting me in actually lets the guy below me in too. It averages out, and they don't have to have other guys well above the index."

The case is somewhat different for football, which doesn't fall under the team-wide index, but instead categorizes its players by "banding" or deviations determined by the school's academic mean.

According to Fitzsimmons, Harvard can admit 10 players into the lowest band, the band where scores lie two deviations below the academic mean. The other twenty-five recruits admitted in any given year must fall within or above one standard below the mean.

"There's not any question that admissions is a challenge for us, but [the admissions office] is generally right, and case by the case they've been very fair," says Murphy. "Usually our recruits are in the top ten percent of their [high school] class, which is most important, and their test scores are virtually always 1200 and above."

Other coaches say their players are of the same academic caliber as the average Harvard student.

"You pick any group of 22 students, pick them out of a hat, and I'll put my players up against them," Wheaton says, adding that two of this year's top recruits both have combines SAT scores of more than 1500.

Index Jockeying

Both banding and team-wide indices are sources disagreement between Harvard and other Ivy League schools.

All seven of the other Ivies, most significantly Penn and Cornell, have lower index scores. This allows these schools to recruit from a wider pool of applicants.

Understandably, Harvard doesn't like this.

"Harvard has been known to be concerned that other schools are allowed to have football teams whose [academic] standards are not as high as its own," says a spokesperson from the ivy League's headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reardon notes the discrepancy between Harvard's admissions standards and those of other schools.

"A big area of discussion is the 1000-1100 SAT range. Under the Academic Index, Penn can take more students with these scores than we can, but we were never going to take hoards of people from that range anyway," he says.

Reardon also expresses doubt about the overall success of the index, citing the exceptions made in order to remedy the failures of the academic index.

Columbia's athletic standings were historically so low that the school was given a temporary release from the academic index. Now that it has built itself back up, that release has ended.

"The formula is something to worry about when people need exceptions." Reardon says.

And although many of the University's critics claim that it has an unfair advantage because everyone who its accepted attends, Carol Kleinfelder, coach of the women's lacrosse team, says she does not see that.

"I don't think we have a high yield in women's athletics," she says. "I don't know if women view it as a tough place for them or what. I do think cities scare them a little more and I don't know why but a lot of girls seem more comfortable in a safer place like Dartmouth."

Building the Best

With academic standards playing a key role in shaping teams, coaches must sometimes search far and wide for suitable candidates.

Murphy begins his recruiting process for the next year in February with a blanket mailing to every school in the United States and Canada.

High school coaches are asked to respond and inform the staff if they believe they have any candidates. In addition, Murphy and his staff look at Blue-Chip and other national and regional recruiting publications, and get input from alumni across the country.

Additionally, each spring, early prospects are sent cards which they are asked to complete with their academic and athletic profiles.

"This gives us access on paper to all the supposed Ivy football prospects," Murphy says. "The bad news is that most of the kids are not academically Harvard material and most are not division one caliber players, but this is where you have to start."

According to Murphy, by June the list is whittled down to 3000 "suspects" and then further cut to 800 by December 1.

In a visiting period between December 1 and March 1, Murphy estimates that he spends five days a week on the road. Last year he personally visited 83 recruits between Maine and California.

Finally, in March, the coaches and admissions officers determine the 35 recruits that they agree are "Harvard Material."

Murphy believes heavy recruiting efforts are Harvard's only hope of building a team better than others in the Ivy League.

"The visits are necessary. I want to meet him and see what he's like and, quite frankly, without a personal approach he may go to Yale or Princeton," Murphy says, "Ivy recruiting is not that different from other schools or from Cincinnati--we just do it very Spartan and frugally."

Although Restic refuses to speak specifically about the current Harvard programs, he says he has problems with the intensive recruiting being undertaken by Murphy.

"It becomes a self destructive process. You need to build better facilities and as soon as you don't have the edge you spend more to get ahead in recruiting," Restic says "In the end it will destroy college football, it will become so expensive it is no longer an amateur sport."

In Restic's day, such ardent recruiting was virtually unknown.

In 23 years of coaching, Restic says he made only one visit to an athlete's home, and that was to discuss a financial aid consideration.

"During the first half of my tenure, we didn't even recruit schools, we didn't go on the road at all, [Applicants] had to come to the school on their own, and [Harvard] didn't pay their expenses," Restic says.

Officials say Harvard's strategy under Restic was largely to rely on the pull of its name. Indeed, the rest of the league has traditionally complaining they could not compete with Harvard's nation-leading yield.

But as recruiting continued to grow Harvard's name stopped going as far. Sources say Restic's dislike of active recruiting and his late start to the yearly recruiting process led to disagreement with the athletic department during the last few years of his tenure. Sources say there were years in who is the season had ended, and Restic had not yet begun to recruit for the next year.

Although the recruiting patterns of the last two football coaches could not be more different, the careful selection of players of Harvard's sports teams is no new phenomenon.

A Golden Age

Grey-haired fans still dream of the days when Harvard dominated national football.

In the first few decades of the century the University plundered the docks of South Boston to field its teams Athletes academic ability was not negligible. It was overlooked entirely.

I don't know if they ever went to class," Reardon says.

Once Harvard was a serious football threat, winning 317 games and losing only 65 over a course of 40 years between 1890 and 1930.

In those days, Harvard was also known as the nation's recruiting powerhouse.

Alumni were charged with the responsibility of recruiting for sports teams. Fitzsimmons describes Harvard's alumni network founded in the early 30s, as "the most extensive in the [Ivy] League."

This network gave the Crimson a substantial recruiting advantage on and off the field.

"We used to have alumni recruit all kinds of kids for us. One alumni covered just about all of California for us, and he would recruit not only football players, but a lot of other non-athletes, too," says Fitzsimmons. "He would start up conversations with kids he was sitting next to at the games he attended. He opened up a lot of schools for us."

When NCAA rules mandated replacing alumni recruiting with coaches visits, Harvard fought hard against the reversal.

Reardon recalls a fight on the floor of an NCAA convention between himself and Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State football coach.

The Harvard athletic director had argued that it was better to use alumni recruiters because their interest in drawing students went beyond the athletic field to include the whole student.

Under the old system, an alumni recruiter could visit a single school to talk to the quarterback, newspaper editor and valedictorian.

But Paterno believed that alumni could not recruit objectively and called Reardon "a romanticist from Harvard who does not understand the real world."

Those involved with Harvard athletics say moving away from alumni recruiting was bed for the University, arguing that coaches such as Paterno operated in schools with corrupt alumni networks.

"I still think for us it does not make much sense. It pulls them out of the context of other candidates," Glimp said.

Despite debates over the nature and importance of recruiting, all coaches agree there is a permanent trend toward in-dept recruiting as a result of increased academic standards combined with alumni pressure to play well.

For teams such as football, hoping to return to prominence, coaches say a successful recruiting program offers the chance to do well, at least among other lvy League schools

Although the efforts have yes to show results, many say they expect Murphy's hard work to pay off in future seasons, and the coach himself says he is still two years away from fielding his team.

Still, recruiting is the building block of the team. Even though the only schools Harvard really recruits against are Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and some of the service academics, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find winning combinations of athletic ability and academic aptitude.

Admission Process

The admissions office is very much a part of the recruiting process, particularly at Harvard.

"Each of the 41 sports teams has one person on our staff who acts as a liaison. We ask coaches to provide information on people applying who would make a tremendous difference to that particular sport," Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons '67 says. "We then ask coaches to rank applicants in order of priority and go from there."

The close relationship between admissions officers and coaches ensures that extra attention is paid to recruits' applications--especially those recruits, like a goalie, who would fill key needs on a team.

But although special consideration is given, coaches say even much-wanted players are continually rejected.

This difficulty of finding recruits who can meet admission standards, however, greatly varies by sport.

Coaches and administrators alike say much of this variation is the result of the different backgrounds of players in the various sports.

"You look at men's basketball and where the best players in that sport are coming from, and it is unlikely that you're going to find as wide a pool of qualified applicants as you'll find in women's soccer," says Tim W. Wheaton, the varsity women's soccer coach. "The dominant women's soccer programs around the country come from primarily suburban, affluent, educationally-oriented areas and homes, with kids who would be applying to Harvard even if they didn't play soccer."

As a result, prep-school teams such as squash and crew tend to draw players who combine athletics and academics.

In contrast, sources close to the athletic department say that in his first year here Murphy was constantly frustrated when the admissions office rejected many athletes he considered qualified.

These rejections are not entirely the responsibility of the admissions office. Harvard is constrained in who it can admit in many sports by an Academic Index instituted in the 1980s to combat charges that academic standards for athletes were declining.

"My sense of what was happening in the league was that there was a perception that some schools were cheating," Reardon says. "In a way it was like working In Washington during the Cold War, where you always assumed the worst of the other side and so you lowered your own standards."

The academic index breaks down athletes' standardized test scores and high school class ranks to assure they are above a minimum standard. Each applicant is rated in three categories. SAT I, SAT II (formerly achievement tests) and class rank.

The admissions office averages an applicant's two best SAT I scores, then divides the resulting number by ten. An average score of 1200, for instance, becomes a 60.

The same procedure is applied to the average of applicant's three best SAT II scores and their class rank, which is approximated onto a scale of 1 to 80. The three resulting scores are added together to create an applicant's index.

The highest possible index is 240, and the College average is 210. The minimum index Ivy League schools will accept is 161, although exceptions are sometimes made for students with compelling non-athletic reasons.

"The main idea of the index is that we want to have people who are representative of the student body as a whole," Fitzsimmons says. "What the Ivy League does not want is to have athletes way over their heads. The goal is to have athlete graduation rates representative of college-wide graduation rates."

The academic index extends beyond individual qualifications, and operates on a team-wide basis for football, men's hockey and men's basketball.

Although the 161 baseline still applies to individual players, the hockey and basketball recruits will not be admitted if their scores would cause the team's average to fall below the mean of the College.

This can sometimes result, however, in drastic gaps between players' scores.

Consider the case of Doug M. Sproule '98, a hockey player who scored close to 1500 on his SAT I.

"My scores made the process much easier," Sproule says. "Because my scores allowed me to be above average for the index, letting me in actually lets the guy below me in too. It averages out, and they don't have to have other guys well above the index."

The case is somewhat different for football, which doesn't fall under the team-wide index, but instead categorizes its players by "banding" or deviations determined by the school's academic mean.

According to Fitzsimmons, Harvard can admit 10 players into the lowest band, the band where scores lie two deviations below the academic mean. The other twenty-five recruits admitted in any given year must fall within or above one standard below the mean.

"There's not any question that admissions is a challenge for us, but [the admissions office] is generally right, and case by the case they've been very fair," says Murphy. "Usually our recruits are in the top ten percent of their [high school] class, which is most important, and their test scores are virtually always 1200 and above."

Other coaches say their players are of the same academic caliber as the average Harvard student.

"You pick any group of 22 students, pick them out of a hat, and I'll put my players up against them," Wheaton says, adding that two of this year's top recruits both have combines SAT scores of more than 1500.

Index Jockeying

Both banding and team-wide indices are sources disagreement between Harvard and other Ivy League schools.

All seven of the other Ivies, most significantly Penn and Cornell, have lower index scores. This allows these schools to recruit from a wider pool of applicants.

Understandably, Harvard doesn't like this.

"Harvard has been known to be concerned that other schools are allowed to have football teams whose [academic] standards are not as high as its own," says a spokesperson from the ivy League's headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reardon notes the discrepancy between Harvard's admissions standards and those of other schools.

"A big area of discussion is the 1000-1100 SAT range. Under the Academic Index, Penn can take more students with these scores than we can, but we were never going to take hoards of people from that range anyway," he says.

Reardon also expresses doubt about the overall success of the index, citing the exceptions made in order to remedy the failures of the academic index.

Columbia's athletic standings were historically so low that the school was given a temporary release from the academic index. Now that it has built itself back up, that release has ended.

"The formula is something to worry about when people need exceptions." Reardon says.

And although many of the University's critics claim that it has an unfair advantage because everyone who its accepted attends, Carol Kleinfelder, coach of the women's lacrosse team, says she does not see that.

"I don't think we have a high yield in women's athletics," she says. "I don't know if women view it as a tough place for them or what. I do think cities scare them a little more and I don't know why but a lot of girls seem more comfortable in a safer place like Dartmouth."

Building the Best

With academic standards playing a key role in shaping teams, coaches must sometimes search far and wide for suitable candidates.

Murphy begins his recruiting process for the next year in February with a blanket mailing to every school in the United States and Canada.

High school coaches are asked to respond and inform the staff if they believe they have any candidates. In addition, Murphy and his staff look at Blue-Chip and other national and regional recruiting publications, and get input from alumni across the country.

Additionally, each spring, early prospects are sent cards which they are asked to complete with their academic and athletic profiles.

"This gives us access on paper to all the supposed Ivy football prospects," Murphy says. "The bad news is that most of the kids are not academically Harvard material and most are not division one caliber players, but this is where you have to start."

According to Murphy, by June the list is whittled down to 3000 "suspects" and then further cut to 800 by December 1.

In a visiting period between December 1 and March 1, Murphy estimates that he spends five days a week on the road. Last year he personally visited 83 recruits between Maine and California.

Finally, in March, the coaches and admissions officers determine the 35 recruits that they agree are "Harvard Material."

Murphy believes heavy recruiting efforts are Harvard's only hope of building a team better than others in the Ivy League.

"The visits are necessary. I want to meet him and see what he's like and, quite frankly, without a personal approach he may go to Yale or Princeton," Murphy says, "Ivy recruiting is not that different from other schools or from Cincinnati--we just do it very Spartan and frugally."

Although Restic refuses to speak specifically about the current Harvard programs, he says he has problems with the intensive recruiting being undertaken by Murphy.

"It becomes a self destructive process. You need to build better facilities and as soon as you don't have the edge you spend more to get ahead in recruiting," Restic says "In the end it will destroy college football, it will become so expensive it is no longer an amateur sport."

In Restic's day, such ardent recruiting was virtually unknown.

In 23 years of coaching, Restic says he made only one visit to an athlete's home, and that was to discuss a financial aid consideration.

"During the first half of my tenure, we didn't even recruit schools, we didn't go on the road at all, [Applicants] had to come to the school on their own, and [Harvard] didn't pay their expenses," Restic says.

Officials say Harvard's strategy under Restic was largely to rely on the pull of its name. Indeed, the rest of the league has traditionally complaining they could not compete with Harvard's nation-leading yield.

But as recruiting continued to grow Harvard's name stopped going as far. Sources say Restic's dislike of active recruiting and his late start to the yearly recruiting process led to disagreement with the athletic department during the last few years of his tenure. Sources say there were years in who is the season had ended, and Restic had not yet begun to recruit for the next year.

Although the recruiting patterns of the last two football coaches could not be more different, the careful selection of players of Harvard's sports teams is no new phenomenon.

A Golden Age

Grey-haired fans still dream of the days when Harvard dominated national football.

In the first few decades of the century the University plundered the docks of South Boston to field its teams Athletes academic ability was not negligible. It was overlooked entirely.

I don't know if they ever went to class," Reardon says.

Once Harvard was a serious football threat, winning 317 games and losing only 65 over a course of 40 years between 1890 and 1930.

In those days, Harvard was also known as the nation's recruiting powerhouse.

Alumni were charged with the responsibility of recruiting for sports teams. Fitzsimmons describes Harvard's alumni network founded in the early 30s, as "the most extensive in the [Ivy] League."

This network gave the Crimson a substantial recruiting advantage on and off the field.

"We used to have alumni recruit all kinds of kids for us. One alumni covered just about all of California for us, and he would recruit not only football players, but a lot of other non-athletes, too," says Fitzsimmons. "He would start up conversations with kids he was sitting next to at the games he attended. He opened up a lot of schools for us."

When NCAA rules mandated replacing alumni recruiting with coaches visits, Harvard fought hard against the reversal.

Reardon recalls a fight on the floor of an NCAA convention between himself and Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State football coach.

The Harvard athletic director had argued that it was better to use alumni recruiters because their interest in drawing students went beyond the athletic field to include the whole student.

Under the old system, an alumni recruiter could visit a single school to talk to the quarterback, newspaper editor and valedictorian.

But Paterno believed that alumni could not recruit objectively and called Reardon "a romanticist from Harvard who does not understand the real world."

Those involved with Harvard athletics say moving away from alumni recruiting was bed for the University, arguing that coaches such as Paterno operated in schools with corrupt alumni networks.

"I still think for us it does not make much sense. It pulls them out of the context of other candidates," Glimp said.

Despite debates over the nature and importance of recruiting, all coaches agree there is a permanent trend toward in-dept recruiting as a result of increased academic standards combined with alumni pressure to play well.

For teams such as football, hoping to return to prominence, coaches say a successful recruiting program offers the chance to do well, at least among other lvy League schools