LAST WEEK, I had dinner with a woman whose daughter is a marvelously talented high school athlete and also carries an impeccable academic record. The daughter was a red hot prospect in the Ivy League, and she was trying to decide between Harvard and Brown. Brown was applying the pressure, trying to draw her to Providence. "I thought the Brown coach was going to move in with us," the mother told me. "But the Harvard coach--well, I hardly ever saw her."

The daughter decided in favor of Cambridge, for a variety of reasons; but the incident illustrates the sort of attitudinal disparity that currently plagues Ivy League sports, slowly eroding them, especially here, where Harvard struggles to uphold academic ideals in the face of ever-increasing athletic competitiveness.

A careful recollection of Harvard sports, 1976-80, bristles with vivid triumphs; staggers under the weight of expansive change; and, most of all, battles the gloomy veil of disappointment. This disappointment, in my mind, overwhelms almost all other memories because it seems to be consuming, steadily, the University's sports program. In effect, this disappointment is a function of the rest of the Harvard athletic program--it follows naturally from the victories and transformations that raise, in both participants and spectators, the hope of progress.

Harvard has, by leaps and bounds, upgraded its athletic program over the last four years. A dramatic facilities facelift has provided the University with badly needed first-rate homes for swimming, hockey and track. And the expected renovation of Briggs Cage, which will transform the Cambridge Dustbowl into a sparkling new basketball arena, certainly will give Crimson athletes access to a top-notch athletic complex (assuming, of course, that ancient Harvard Stadium does not crumble in the near future).

Yet this red-brick superstructure shelters a group of student athletes who are caught in the middle of Harvard's inability to decide what to do with itself. Athletes--and their coaches--have been thrust into the current of a competitive upswing that has been nourished amid the traditional Harvard attitudes of "sports for everyone," "participation first, winning second," and "brooks before ballgames." The contradiction is an obvious one, though the University seems unable to come to terms with it.

Consequently, Harvard carries an athletic program that attempts to compete successfully on a national level. It insists on maintaining Division I eligibility in most sports and aims to move up the division ranks in other sports, where fledging Crimson squads are not immediately eligible for top-flight status e.g., women's basketball, which, since 1976, has moved from being a pathetic joke, to the top of Division II in the AIAW, to frustrating inconsistency in Division I).

Obviously, Harvard's rigorous admission standards, lack of a persuasive recruiting program, absence of a physical education or similar "quasi-academic" major, and refusal to indulge in many other athletic ego-stroking actions, limits the University's appeal. Many of the nation's blue-chip prospects, who have athletic tunnel vision and hunger for a high-caliber program, are not going to be attracted by the educational advantages of a Harvard. Yet inexplicably, Harvard often competes against the very schools that do harbor such hot-shots. The handicap that Crimson teams must confront in contests is both clear and substantial.

INTERMITTENT sucesses only provide the architects of such a program with a false sense of progress. The self-delusion, though, is apparent; take, for example, the case of the men's swim team.

Joe Bernal has built a small dynasty in his new Blodgett Palace, and the aquamen have risen to the top of the Eastern ranks. This year, when Bernal decided to test the Crimson's prowess against a national power, he brought Indiana to town. Amazingly, Harvard dumped to Hoosiers, bringing chaos to the national rankings and raising questions about the omnipotence of Harvard swimming. On the surface, it seemed Harvard had achieved national stature while, ostensibly, maintaining its student-academic standards.

But three weeks later, the falseness of that proposition was driven home: Harvard did a nose dive in the Nationals. At its peak, Harvard could up end a national power that was saving something for those Nationals; but that Championship meet showed that, Harvard University, is still a long way from athletic superstardom on a large-scale level.

However, Harvard people are proud, and though they won't openly claim that the school boasts national sports power, they also won't readily humble themselves to admitting that we have a program that just cannot stack up against "major-leaguing" sports universities. And it shouldn't--not if this is going to remain the nation's foremost educational institution. Unfortunately, very few people can combine top-flight scholarship with superstar capabilities: most mortals must choose one or the other, making the second choice an avocation, more than a profession. (In that rare category of scholar-athletes, Harvard draws a fairly good proportion of the people: but such wonders prove too few and far between to provide the solid groundwork for an outstanding sports program.

The tragedy emerges as the Harvard program drifts toward the mythical status of all-powerful, while athletes in Cambridge are constantly churned up by contradictory forces. The problem can be seen most clearly in the women's sports program here, which has bounded to great heights in the past four years.

In the midst of Title IX equality gibberish, women's sports got an administrative push, and the women responded. An influx of coaches; the appearance of amenities such as lockerrooms, uniforms, traveling budgets, and so forth; as well as a gradual effort to attract more high school-trained women athletes, turned around such programs as basketball soccer, lacrosse and swimming.

Most dramatically, the soccer team, after only its second year of varsity status, rose to supremacy in the East--and perhaps the nation--tying for top honors last fall in the regional championship (there is no organized national playoff yet), but improvement has come at a cost--to both women and coaches.

Many of the "older" women--juniors and seniors--have found themselves ousted from teams by a new crop of well-trained, specialty athletes--students who have entered with strong high school backgrounds and a desire to exel in a specific sport. Also, many women who came here believing the sports program would be a somewhat low-pressure athletic opportunity have flinched at the impact of accelerating competitiveness; and many of them, especially the juniors and seniors, have fled interscholastic sports, succumbing to the pressures of trying to practice and study.