Swimming trends are the same. In the past five years, 10 sophomores have failed to win letters again as juniors. For about eight years, Coach Brooks says, senior participation has dropped. "The sport takes tremendous drive and can become your master," says Brooks. "I understand when a boy finally finds the pressure too much."

Fencing and skiing demonstrate an equally scarce participation from upperclassmen. It is these individual sports, which offer less rigid training schedules, that seniors avoid. In fact, football, soccer, hockey, and baseball teams all have a large jump in lettermen from the sophomore to junior year. These sports also have junior varsity teams that serve as training grounds. Yovicsin, a firm believer in experience and careful play, arranges for Harvard to have more junior varsity games than anyone else in the league. He never has more than five sophomore regulars on his teams, even with the two-platoon system.

It is worth noting that Harvard's freshman football teams are extremely successful. Except for last fall, when the team compiled a 4-1-1 record, Harvard has downed all Ivy opposition, barely lost only once a year ago to Boston College, and recorded two undefeated seasons before that one.

Track and cross country, sports dependent on physical maturity and individual training, show a decline in competitors after the sophomore year but then a rise before the senior year. Runners, especially those of Coach Bill McCurdy, are a breed unto themselves.

Under coaches like Jack Barnaby and Harry Parker, who have built up sports dynasties, sophomore starters never quit, and the burden falls upon seniors. In squash, many juniors who could not make it as sophomores earn letters. One member of the class of 1967 lettered last year, but this year there are five from the class of 1967.

Barnaby teaches novices well enough their freshman and sophomore years so that they sun move up a few notches into a low starting position their junior year, and then take a prominent spot as a senior. Barnaby always has two or three such students, such as Matt Hall or Todd Wilkinson.

The one sport which enlists almost total dedication is crew, in which Parker has developed an unsurpassed tradition. There have been as many as eight seniors among nine letter winners and as few as two, but there never have been underclass letter winners one year who don't return the next season.

Crew escaped the usual doom for senior-laden spring teams last year by having oarsmen like Paul Gunderson and Geoff Picard take the whole semester off. This year's lacrosse team, with the most seniors in seven years, was less fortunate. It was unvictorious in Ivy competition.

Most coaches accept the senior decay as normal, and even as healthy. "It wouldn't be Harvard if more than a few boys devoted their greatest amount of attention to athletics," says one coach. Recognizing the necessity for outside interests, Barnaby keeps only loose demands on his players in order to avoid binding them down.

At the end of the college career of a Crimson swimmer who eventually became an Olympian, Brooks asked him, "Why didn't you go to Yale?" "Those were the old days," says Brooks. "That boy was giving 80 per cent of his energy to swimming at a time when I was giving a corny speech about dedicating 30 per cent to swimming."