To one who has followed the varsity track team, man and boy, for two seasons, a single fact becomes painfully apparent--it has been vastly under-rated by everyone, save perhaps the team members themselves.

Consistently, the varsity has gone into its meets underdogs, only to come up with some clutch performance or two to smack down all obstreperous pretenders to the Heptagonal title.

Take the Army meet, for instance. On paper, the Cadets loomed as the strongest team in the Heptagonal league. Senior weight thrower Pete Harpel set the tenor of the meet in the first event. He threw the 35-pound ball 55 feet, 6 inches, six feet farther than his best last season, to pick up the first place for the varsity.

In the next event, Jim Doty, a consistent 45-foot shotputter, went wild and threw 48 feet, 41/2 inches for another Crimson win. In the third field event, the broad jump, Henry Wente won with a leap of 22 feet, 2 inches. He had never placed before.

In the dash, Joel Landau Whipped Bob Kyasky, the Sunday morning darling of the New York dailies, while Phil Williams won the first 1000 he had ever entered in his four year indoor career.

And so it went all during the season. Someone came up with the big, unexpected performance.

Coach Bill McCurdy is as much at a loss to explain this phenomenon as anyone. He compared his team to the "Little Engine That Could." They believed that they were the best team in the league and could lick any other team on any specified afternoon. They were almost cocky," he explained with understandable pride.

Actually, the team contained a nucleus of consistent performers who could be counted on for big points in every meet. Two-miler Pete Reider, captain Dick Wharton, Jim Cairns, record-holder in both the 600 and the 1000, and Harpel, all seniors but Reider, had been the big point producers for three years.

But in addition to these elite, several sophomore Whiz Kids blossomed out to join the ranks of the heroic. John deKiewiet was unbeaten all year in the high jump. Consistently around six feet, two inches, he appears sure bet to erase the one blot on Harvard's glorious escutcheon--a feeble 6 feet 31/2 inch high jump record.

Landau is another. Not only did he prove the mainstay in the dash, but he also proved outstanding in the hurdles, a previously foreign and abhorrent event, when ace Joel Cohen reinjured his foot. The neophyte hurdler actually broke the indoor record in the Yale meet.

Doty, in the shot put, stood alone between glory and oblivion, for without him, opponents would have swept the event in every meet.

But, in addition to this nucleus, there were sunsung heroes: Sandy Dodge in the dash, Williams in the mile, Dave Norris in the two-mile, Dave Spinney, Bill Thompson, and Al Gordon in the two-mile relay, and Mike Robertson, who later suffered a gashed leg in a losing cause as lead-off man for the mile relay team. French Anderson, before and after his injury, proved one of the best middle distance runners in the league.

Senior Bill Morris, a disappointment since his freshman year, came along to alleviate the team's miseries after Anderson's loss.

John DuMoulin had never thrown the weight prior to this season, yet he threw 54 feet, 2 inches to win the Harvard-Yale-Princeton triangular meet, much to the consternation of the favoured Yalies. He placed fourth behind Harpel in the Heptagonals.

McCurdy mentioned that much of the team's showing was a good deal of luck, an ability to take advantage of the breaks. The defection of Princeton's Rod Zwirner and Dick Knorr in the triangular meet, or of Cornell's John King in the Heps certainly did not hurt the varsity. Yet such an argument is valid only if the varsity had not had its own troubles. For had Joel Cohen, broad jumper Dave Gately, Robertson, Anderson, et al. not been injured, the varsity's power would have reached frightening proportions in comparison to its Heptagonal rivals.

Ask the team members why they went undefeated, and to a man they will point to McCurdy as the chief motivating factor--McCurdy, the master of psychology, the champion juggler, the spiritual leader who could get the most out of his personnel. To them, he was the biggest factor in their success story, one of the finest in Harvard athletics.