Although Harvard led the Ivy League this year in most championships, five, it did not have enough overall depth to beat out Yale in total points scored. Points were tabulated on the basis of five points for a first place, three for a second and one for a third.
Yale had four firsts, four seconds and five thirds, for 37 points, while Harvard amassed 5 firsts, three seconds and two thirds, for 36 points. Princeton followed with 32 points and then Cornell, 28, Dartmouth, 12, Penn, 9, Columbia, 9, and Brown, 1.
Harvard took first place in soccer, squash, hockey, track, and tennis. Yale topped the league in golf, lacrosse, baseball, and swimming.
Yale, however, turned in what may be the top collegiate athletic performance of the year when it nosed out the top crews in the nation to become America's eight-man rowing representative in Australia this winter.
The only Harvardmen competing for Olympic positions were Bob Rittenburg, captain of the 1955 Crimson track squad, and Pete Harpel, the track team's leading hammer-thrower this year. Rittenburg won his heat in the 440 meter hurdles but could not quite make it in the finals as three of his opponents broke the existing world record. Harpel finished well out of the running in the hammer.
On the tennis scene, Brooks Harris, captain of the 1956 tennis team, has been playing the New England tournament circuit in preparation for the forth-coming Harvard-Yale versus Oxford-Cambridge match. He will play along with Dale Junta of Harvard and Eric Moore and Ed Meyer of Yale in defense of the cup which the Americans won in an upset victory last year.
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