The Harvard swimming team has fallen on hard times this year. Harvard is not likely to finish in the top of its league, but there will be a chance for its promising young swimmers to gain valuable experience.

Harvard has been building for the last four years. During this period it has finished fifth three times in the eight-team Eastern Swimming League. Again this year Coach Bill Brooks admits "We'll be working hard to finish in the top five." Yale, the perennial champions, should be followed by Army, Navy, Princeton, and Dartmouth with strong teams. Cornell, Columbia, and Penn should battle it out with Harvard.

In an effort to keep up with the championship pace set by Yale and the other top teams, Brooks introduced a system of cuts for the first time this year. He established a qualifying time for each event. If a swimmer could not break the time he was dropped from the team.

"We had to do this because we weren't getting many swimmers of Eastern League calibre. This system will eliminate the tourist swimmer--the kind of boy who takes up space in practice but contributes little in meets," says Brooks.

The cuts make this year's squad the smallest in Harvard's history--18 men. Brooks says that the policy will give added incentive to his back-up swimmers, for now nobody is sure of his spot on the squad.

Two who are sure of their spots, however, are senior freestyler Bill Shrout and diver Bill Murphy, a junior.

Shrout, one of the top sprinters in the league, swims five events as well as two relays well enough to give strong competition in any of them. Last year at the Eastern Seaboard Meet he broke the Harvard record for the 200-yard freestyle event with a time of 1:47.8. In the Yale meet he was just edged by the famed Don Schollander in the 50-yard freestyle event. Brooks says Shrout is a leading contender for the 1968 Olympic team.

Murphy, who won the Eastern Seaboard Meet in the three-meter event and qualified for the NCAA's is back this year looking better than ever. He was the only Harvard team member to make the All-Ivy swimming team last year. Brooks calls him the finest diver in the Eastern League.

Team Captain Pete Alter provides added strength for the diving squad. John Bragg and Pete Adams back up Shrout in the freestyle and individual medley events. The weakest area on the team is the 200 yard backstroke event where the best backstroker, Alan Birch, could do last year was a not-fast-enough 2:11.4.

Today the Crimson faces a weak team from Springfield at the Indoor Athletic Building at 4 p.m. Last year Harvard swamped the swimmers from Springfield 61-34. This year the opener should prove no different. But the first real test of the building process will come on Dec. 9 when the cadets from Army come to swim.