Journey To End For Seniors On Weekend

As the season winds down for the Harvard men’s basketball team, so do the college careers for the team’s two seniors.

For captain guard Jim Goffredo and forward Brian Darcy, this weekend’s games at Cornell and Columbia are the final times they will put on the Crimson and White uniforms, or any basketball uniform in a competitive environment.

“It’s pretty emotional for me, because anybody who makes it through four years of college [basketball] has been playing basketball forever,” Goffredo said. “Just to know it’s my last two games here, it’s kind of a big deal. I kind of wish it would be at home instead of on the road. It’s just a lot of different emotions, it’s hard to say.”

Goffredo and Darcy were honored at Lavietes Pavilion for Senior Night last Saturday before the Crimson’s final home game of the season against Princeton. The team sent the seniors out on top with a 50-43 victory.

The two seniors are blockmates and each havebeen on the team for all four years. Goffredo has been a starter each of the previous two seasons and was a top reserve the two years prior to that. He had played in 106 career games, one shy of the all-time record. He led Harvard in scoring last season, averaging 14.9 points per game.

Darcy has been the first frontcourt player off the bench in each of the past two seasons. He started six games last season and on Senior Night.

[Goffredo and Darcy] have both been workman-like players their entire career,” Crimson coach Frank Sullivan said. “You can probably pick on two hands the number of times they have missed practice. They have been very resilient all the time. Very workman like, very resilient, excellent practice players. Two guys who at their core are rank-and-file guys, [who] will do what is good for the good of the order and will do that every day to the best of [their] ability.”

Goffredo has been named Ivy League Player of the Week three times in his career and earned another honor yesterday when he was named a Second Team Academic All-American by ESPN the Magazine. The captain is the fifth player in team history to be named an Academic All-American. The most recent winner before him was three-time team Most Valuable Player Matt Stehle ’06, who was named to the Second Team last season.

“It mean’s a lot, because you know you are a basketball player, but you are also here to be a good student at the best school in the country,” Goffredo said. “It means a lot for someone like me who is not going to be playing basketball anymore after this weekend at a competitive level, to accomplish something like that is a big deal.”

Goffredo had previously been selected to the Academic All-District Team.

“It’s a great, great honor for him to be selected,” Sullivan said. “I thought getting into the preliminary round was terrific, then to see him picked for the Second Team was just unbelievable. I’m really proud of him and he deserves it. Being a two semester sport athlete is hard everywhere, but it is very hard in the Ivy League. It is hard to balance it for two consecutive semesters, given the demands of intercollegiate basketball.”

Goffredo has two more games in which to add to his legacy at Harvard as he and Darcy close out their careers at Cornell tonight and at Columbia tomorrow.

—Staff writer Ted Kirby can be reached at tjkirby@fas.harvard.edu.