With a second-place finish in the Eastern League at stake, the Harvard swimming team closes out its regular season this afternoon when it travels to New Haven, Conn. to face a strong Yale team.

A win, couple with a Dartmouth victory over Penn, would give the Crimson a share of second with the Indians. A loss, however, could drop the team as low as fourth, behind Dartmouth, Yale and league champion Princeton, Yale, like Princeton, which beat the Crimson, 67-46, and Penn, which lost to Harvard, 58-55, is a strong favorite in the meet.

The Bulldogs, if anything, appear stronger in relation to Harvard than the other two, and a Crimson victory, while not out of the question, would represent an upset of even greater dimension than the come-from-behind win over Penn last weekend.

Yale, led by captain Bob Kasting, has traditionally been the powerhouse squad in the Ivy league, but coach Phil Moriarty's superiority in the East is beginning to crumble. Last year Penn, which at one time had so little talent that they shaved down for Columbia, surfaced to beat the Eli for the first time and in the process ended a string of Yale championships at nine.

Scramble

This year, the scramble near the tope of the league has been further complicated by the emergence of Princeton, Dartmouth and Harvard as Ivy swimming powers, and Yale's dominance appears to be a thing of the past.

But, although the Elishave slipped a bit, it has been more a result of the other teams's improvement than a decline in the Yale program. In fact, the Bulldogs are even stronger this year than last, when they beat Harvard, 63-50. "We have the same type of chance of winning as we did against Penn, Princeton and Dartmouth," said coach Don Gambril. If they swim their best times they could beat us by as much as 15 points," he added.

Sleeping Elis

Any chance of beating Yale by sneaking into New Heaven and catching the Elis asleep evaporated last weekend when the Crimson pulled their stunning upset over Penn. "After we beat Penn, they suddenly have to be concerned with us," said Gambril.

Judging from a comparison of times, Yale has too much depth and individual talent to predict a Crimson win, but anything can happen in a traditional rivalry such as this one. The Harvard swimmers will have to come up with their best performances to win more than a handful of races because Yale has better recorded times in every event except the 1000-yd., 200-yd. and 500-yd. free.

Perhaps the biggest problem the Harvard team will have this afternoon will be staying awake. The Harvard Department of Athletics, adhering to its iron-clad policy of busing whenever possible, has ruled out the possibility of an overnight to New Haven, and as a result the team bus will have to depart from Cambridge at the ungodly hour of 8 a.m.

Not only will the swimmers have to get up at a ridiculous hour, but they will miss breakfast, and a precious few hours of sleep. "Leaving that early won't be helpful," said Gambril in an example of classic understatement, Co-captain Paul Horvitz could only say "Zzzzzzzz....", while his teammates's reactions varied from apathy to outright anger. Perhaps next year the Athletic Department bureaucracy can scrape up enough money for an overnight, but the team's chances against Yale this year will not be helped by this faux pas.