Tim Taylor was beginning to become a permanent fixture at Harvard, until last weekend. After four undergraduate years here and seven years as freshman and assistant varsity hockey coach, Taylor announced Saturday that he has accepted the challenge of becoming head hockey coach at Yale.

"I did a lot of soul searching," Taylor said yesterday about his decision to take over a program that has produced only two victories at the varsity level in two years. "I had to resolve in my own mind that I wanted to be a head coach. And I think Yale is a good place to launch my career."

This is not the first time Taylor has considered becoming a head coach. He applied to Boston College for the job Len Ceglarski eventually got, and tried last year for the Dartmouth and Colgate positions. "I guess I wasn't positive enough about wanting the jobs," he reasoned.

Taylor's initial reluctance results from a life spent mostly within slapshot distance of Boston--he does not really want to go. "This was part of the decision that I had to make. I have to leave Harvard and a lot of friends," he said, "and I don't feel good about it. But if you did everything because of where you live, you'd miss an awful lot."

In the parlance of Boston hockey circles, Taylor is a "Local." A native of nearby Natick, he went to Milton Academy before entering Harvard to play three years of hockey under former Boston Bruin and Harvard coach Cooney Weiland.

Political Protest

As a senior in 1963, Taylor captained a team many people believe was the best to put on Crimson jerseys, compiling a 21-3-2 record and winning the ECAC championship. Unfortunately, Harvard at the time was protesting the recruiting practices of the Western colleges and told Taylor and his teammates that the school would not accept the bid to the NCAA tournament that the squad was offered.

"We knew it was going to happen," he recalls. "We were upset but it was explained very rationally to us. At that point, there was such a gap between East and West, we wouldn't have had much of a chance anyway."

Reunion

Like present coaches Billy Cleary and Bobby Carr, it was inevitable that Taylor would return to his alma mater, and in 1969 he took a postion as assistant to Weiland, working on a small salary supplemented by his work for the city by organizing the Boston Neighborhood Hockey League (BNHL) with former teammate Gene Kinasewich. He has been at Harvard ever since.

This is not to say that Taylor is provincial. Between graduation and his return to Cambridge, he tried out for the Olympic squad, and, failing that, wound up with a semi-pro team in Waterloo, Iowa. The U.S. Hockey League, which produced NHL players like Bill Masterson and Lou Nanne after the first expansion, gave Taylor a chance to start his coaching career.

"Hockey was a foreign sport to Iowa," Taylor said. "I was hired to teach the kids the game and develop interest there. I ran the program for four years."

Taylor has broadened his coaching base since then, by taking kids familiar with the sport to foreign countries. In the spring of 1973, after the Team Canada-Russia series, he and old pal Kinasewich took 17 high school players to Czechoslavakia and Russia.

Russophiles

Like Fred Shero and the recent wave of Russophiles, Taylor liked what he saw and returned to the Soviet Union for more seminars in 1975, along with 150 Canadian coaches.