Tonight at 9 p.m. the unpredictable varsity hockey team meets Yale at the Arena in the opening game of the traditional best of three game series.
For the first time since before the war, Harvard will be favored to win. If the team exhibits the form and coordination which it showed in both Dartmouth games and the B.U. contest, it will undoubtedly win. If not, Yale may possibly add the Crimson to a list of victims already including Brown, Princeton, and Army.
A Weakened Bulldog
Yale has only a fair hockey team this year, boasting an outstanding record of eight wins and ten losses. It has a good defense, holding its 18 opponents to less than five goals a game, and one good line.
The starting three Eli forwards, Captain Gordie Ritz, Watson Bray, and Allen Clapp, have collected 74 points among them, nine more than the rest of the team combined. Center Bray leads the team in scoring with 17 goals, while Ritz is the playmaker with 16 assists. The only other Yale scoring ace is Tom McNamara with 11 goals and an equal number of assists.
Varsity Has to Win
Coach John Chase's team has a lot more at stake tonight than the Bulldogs. In order to tie for the Pentagonal League lead, the varsity must beat Yale twice and Princeton once. To do this, the Crimson has one crucial advantage. Harvard has three high-scoring lines of almost equal ability, and this depth could conceivably provide the margin of victory.
A crowd of between four and five thousand is expected to witness the event, and the large crowd, combined with the unfortunate Moher-Abbot incident of last year and the recent B.U. fracas, had led Captain Dave Key, Coach Chase, and Student Council President Fischelis to request that the crowd confine its enthusiasm to simple cheering.
The Arena management has provided a curtain raiser between the undefeated freshmen and B.U.'s '52 team to get underway at 7 p.m. The Harvard Band.
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