In recent weeks The Crimson has come under fire for its sports reporting. We have been accused of being insensitive, overtly negative, opportunistic, and unknowledgeable. And since the annual changeover in the executive editorship of the sports staff has just taken place, I feel a statement of policy of Crimson sports reporting is appropriate.

While most of the recent criticism of Crimson sports reporting has centered around the Dave Hynes case and our coverage of the circumstances of his withdrawal, it has come to our attention that there have been rumblings of dissatisfaction with Crimson coverage for some time. Our critics cite the coverage of football (particularly the quarterback situation), the post-season basketball analysis of last spring, and the coverage of basketball during the present season as evidence that we are negatively inclined toward athletics at Harvard and "anti-jock" in our attitude. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The individual sports journalists on the staff are, above all, sports fans. And as such, we would like to see excellence in Harvard athletics. As the primary source of sports news for the Harvard community, we feel that truthful and accurate reporting is a necessity. Sometimes our reporting has been negative, but if one looks at the record, one would find that on these occasions such reporting has been precipitated by equally negative, or at least lackluster, performances on the field or court.

No one complains when we praise good performances. Nor do we receive "hate mail" when we report the success of Harvard's athletic teams.

But when things are not going well, and we write that things are not going well, people jump to criticize our reporting. It is unrealistic to expect any news medium to print only the good side of the news. Any self-respecting public relations man can do that. We are committed, and I do not say this in a self-righteous tone, to seeking and publishing the truth, whether that truth is pleasing or not. We have an obligation to our readers to report things as we see them, to probe problems and inquire into the background of those problems.

I was harshly criticized in October for blasting a quarterback on the football squad, a quarterback whom I felt was not giving Harvard an optimum performance. I hold no personal animosity toward him as an individual and I did not seek to main him psychologically. But after the frustration of watching performance after unsuccessful performance, I felt that a change could not detract from an already meager athletic production. And I wrote what I felt, hoping as did so many other fans, that the end result would be a better team performance for Harvard.

The same situation exists in basketball coverage. There are good things and bad things occurring in the Harvard basketball program. As a news medium, we are committed to expressing both sides. But the criticism that we have voiced on the pages of The Crimson is rooted, as is all our reporting, in a strong desire to see excellence in Harvard athletics.

Crimson football coach Joe Restic told me last fall that "things look different down on the field," indicating that I didn't fully grasp what was going on. The same type of criticism has been leveled at The Crimson sports staff this winter. To this I answer, "Yes, things do look different on the field, but they look different from the stands as well." And it is wrong to allege that one can only understand what is going on from a ground or court level. Crimson sports writers are generally people who follow the sport they cover persistently and diligently through an entire season. And as such, we can observe trends and patterns that evolve. It is our responsibility to attempt to interpret these trends. We have opinions and we feel that opinions are the meat of vital sports reporting. This is the basic premise of sports writing.

We received much flak for our revelation of the causes of the Hynes with-drawal. To this I can only reiterate the editorial response to a letter criticizing our revelations. In that response, appearing in The Crimson of February 10, we said, "A good newspaper has a responsibility to report everything it decides is newsworthy with all possible thoroughness, accuracy, and speed." That is the only way it can be. Dave Hynes is a public figure. As such, his activities always receive public attention. Because he is a public figure, we could not in good faith ignore the fact that he had left the team in mid-season. In the same response we said, "If we had decided not to print the whole story, we would have engaged in a subtle and dangerous form of self-censorship." This is the principle by which we operate. We cannot suppress news that is pertinant to the Harvard athletic community, especially if that news is already circulating in rumor form. It is our aim and it is our duty to clarify rumors and to follow them up to the best of our ability. We were not out to "get" Dave Hynes just as we were not out to "get" Eric Crone. They are public figures and their activities are the concern of the Harvard community. Our aim is to serve that concern.

prised to find how conservative some of his Harvard classmates were. A couple of his freshman teammates had never played ball with blacks before, and Wolfe said their post-game comments bothered him for months.

Another surprise for Wolfe was the lack of enthusiasm at Harvard for basketball. Basketball is to Brooklyn what hockey is to Boston, and Wolfe was surprised at the small and hoop-ignorant audience which came to the games. "People at the games didn't recognize a good play when they saw one," Wolfe said. "It just hasn't caught fire here."

In Brooklyn, every alley has a basket and a waiting line of eager cagers. Kids strut around in Converse sneakers with weights on their ankles, trying to develop leg muscles. Adolescence is the crisis period, with fearful 13-year olds marking their height progress on the schoolyard wall each day.

Wolfe goes back to Brooklyn regularly, where he finds the same old crowd plus a new batch of Brooklyn's finest playing basketball in the school yard across the street from the Wolfe's apartment building. He keeps in touch with kids in our neighborhood even the ones from class 3-303.

Wolfe doesn't plan to return to Brooklyn forever. "When I came here, I just wanted to do real well. Now, I just want to take life easy and be happy," he said.