McGINN 'N JUICE: Allston Move Would Doom Both Soccer Squads

Tucked neatly away inside his office in Massachusetts Hall, University President Lawrence H. Summers dreams of a campus in Allston. Depending on his disposition, his vision includes anywhere from three to eight new upperclass houses—complete with dining halls, a common student space for recreation and classrooms for seminars—a modern science center that will put Harvard’s rivals to shame and maybe even an unfortunate graduate school dragged from its comfortable niche across the Charles.

It is the realization of Summers’ vision, his indelible mark left upon the University for generations to come, a flawless rearrangement of all that he sees as good and a careful erasure of all he frowns upon.

And therein lies the problem.

For while the vision sounds glorious for all that it contains, careful consideration of what it will necessarily sacrifice can mean only one thing: the end of Harvard athletics as even a semi-relevant segment of campus life.

It would seem that quite the opposite would be true at first glance. Move undergraduates across the river, place them right down next to the Soldiers’ Field Complex, and maybe, just maybe, more of them will just pop into Lavietes Pavilion on a Friday evening to catch a basketball game prior to a party or drunkenly stumble into Harvard Stadium the next morning to catch a home game that isn’t The Game.

If you’re going to sunbathe, you might as well just camp out at O’Donnell Field and watch the baseball team sweep Dartmouth to send the Red Rolfe division to a decisive season-ending doubleheader. The field is right there after all.

But will it be?

Though the final draft of a proposal to build additional houses on the far side of the river has not yet been released, it takes very little imagination to determine just where the best available undeveloped real estate in Harvard’s possession lies.

Ohiri Field, home of the Harvard men’s and women’s soccer teams.

Though Athletic Director Robert Scalise sits on the committee researching the potential move and will have a hand in shaping any potential intra-university realignment of properties currently under his control, what other possibilities are there?

On the athletics complex side of North Harvard Street, the spaces closest to the river are already developed to capacity. Harvard Stadium isn’t going to be torn down, nor Lavietes nor Bright Hockey Center. Tearing down Dillon Field House wouldn’t do any good unless the university is planning on building very small houses. Move any further away—past Jordan Field walking alongside the river—and suddenly you’ve made it all the way to the intramural fields, so far away that the new complex’s inhabitants would wish they’d been left alone in the Quad.

Stay on the Business School side of the street and the property is almost equally well-developed. No plans would call for significant downsizing of the B-School, which is already condensed tightly into the limited space it has been afforded, too tightly to intersperse new undergraduate housing. The first available land is Ohiri, right across the street from McCurdy Track.

Now if this is not the location envisioned by the dreamers of the Allston idyll, my apologies. But again, move any farther away and the Quad’s offerings are just as spacious and equally close, not worth the at least nine-figure expense required to support such an undertaking. This hub needs to be close to ensure that the campus can at least maintain some semblance of a unified whole, and the Ohiri land, combined with available space across the river, appears to be a safe bet.

So where does that leave the soccer teams? Who knows.

This 21st-century university will likely ask the largest sacrifice of them, forcing a move to another field marginalized from the main campus. The lands Harvard owns nearby don’t seem to be predisposed to conversion into a pitch, and scheduling overlap would make any efforts to utilize any of the other pre-existing fields not only difficult to plan, but also an exercise in wearing the grass to unplayable conditions.

Does that mean a trip to Watertown? Newton? Will there even be soccer teams?

Move them to a location that is 15 minutes away from the Yard even by car and the purpose of having a team becomes lost. The few students who would have come out in support will require even greater motivation to make the trek to a home game and the meaningful ties the soccer teams have with the University will be cut.

At that point, they’re just the Montreal Expos of the Ivy League, playing one half their schedules on the road, the other at a neutral site that might as well be Puerto Rico given the Harvard student body’s overwhelming apathy towards traveling to support its athletic squads.

Most people won’t care that the soccer teams have lost their relevance, and many will question whether they ever were relevant, but the message sent by Harvard athletics will be clear. We may have 41 varsity sports, and that’s all well and good, but in the end, that’s just a meaningless number. Athletics aren’t at the center of this campus, and even when we had the chance to, we wouldn’t try to incorporate them. We just pushed them even farther away, out of sight and out of mind when doing so was most convenient. And even though President Summers and most of the student body won’t take notice, the athletes will just stop coming. Their university of the future will be someplace else.

—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.