Men's Basketball Starts to Find Winning Ways in '95-'96

For most basketball teams, a 15-11 record is a pretty good season.

But for the Harvard men's basket-ball team, it's a purging. Considering the ignoble history that the Crimson carries with it, a season like the last one presents hope for the future.

"We had a lot of lofty goals coming into the year," junior center Chris Grancio said, "and we met a lot of them."

Winning is the primary goal, obviously, and the Crimson did a lot of that early on in the season. Jumping out of the gate with a 4-0 record--and winning all its games by 20 points or more--Harvard quickly surpassed last season's non-conference win total of three.

In its first league game, however, Harvard fell to Dartmouth, the Crimson's first-ever home loss since Briggs Cage became Lavietes Pavilion this season. In that loss, the Big Green's Sea Lonergan torched the Crimson for 30 points in a 70-61 victory.

Then and there, it became clear that if Harvard was going to do anything productive this season, it would have to rely on its defense.

"Last year [a 6-20 team], we had over 20 games where we gave up a field goal percentage of over 45 percent," Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. "This year, we had 18 games at 45 percent or less, and in 11 games we were under 40."

Another big factor in this season was the play of freshman point guard Tim Hill. A quick player from DeMatha High in Maryland, Hill provided Harvard with its first shooting threat at point guard for many years.

And one cannot forget junior forward Kyle Snowden, who led the team in scoring (15.1 points per game) and has been in the national rebounding leaders all season with 11.1 boards per game.

The Crimson's potential was shown in the early January rematch with Dartmouth. There, Harvard handcuffed its opponents in the second half, holding Lonergan and company to a meager 40 points in the 19-point victory.

That second Dartmouth game helped Harvard begin playing some of its best basketball of the year. Over winter break, Harvard had lost to B.U., Stanford and Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo by relatively close margins and needed to get on the winning side again.

A home win against Navy by one point helped do that, as did the following Dartmouth game. Next thing it knew, the Crimson was 10-5 and 3-1 in the league going into exams.

The second semester was a different story. It started well enough, with wins over UNH and Yale, but a double-overtime loss at Brown preceded a home sweep at the hands of Penn and Princeton.

"After that seven-game winning streak, we felt that we were really on a roll," senior forward Mike Gilmore said. "[After the Brown loss,] I thought at the time that it would help us, but it put us in a downward spiral."

Harvard won only three of its final nine games. Of course, Penn and Princeton each caused two, but Harvard never assumed that these perennial Ivy titans were invulnerable. In fact, had Hill's last-second jumper not clanged off the rim at Penn, that game would have gone into overtime.

Another major problem came for the team right before the first Penn-Princeton series in early February, when sophomore center Paul Fisher had to take the second semester off due to academic reasons. That depleted Harvard's frontcourt to only three people--Snowden, Grancio and captain Darren Rankin, who was limited to part-time duty because of a back injury sustained last season.

Nevertheless, Harvard was never really out of the running for an Ivy League title until the second series against Penn and Princeton on February 23-24.

The last weekend of the year brought perhaps the largest swing of emotions. On Friday night, the Crimson played terribly, losing its second game to the Bears in a 75-62 game that wasn't even that close. But on Saturday, Gilmore drained six of 12 three-pointers and scored 32 points, and Harvard won by a 87-67 margin.

That was the story of the season. Some big wins, but also some room for improvement.