Professors demand performance and coaches demand dilligence; and the tug of war, using the student as a rope, has left many onetime athletic enthusiast disenchanted and often bitter. Also in the middle lie the coaches, trying to drive their teams to greater heights while burdened by their players' classroom demands.
Just how high-powered should a coach be? That seems to be a central problem. Paul Moses, a successful women's squash coach who left last year when his contract was not renewed, was a victim of this indecision. Some of his players complained about his intensity, while others were berating an acquiescence to academic loads. He could satisfy no one, so he left Harvard--or it left him. Stephanie Walsh, the women's swim coach who leaves this year after four seasons, has faced many of the same problems. Speak to any random handful of Harvard women swimmers and you'll get the range of opinions about Walsh: "She's too intense," or "she's not serious enough."
THE STRAIN OF frustration cannot be obscured. You can see it in the face of hockey coach Joe Restic, in the manner of hockey coach Bill Cleary, even though the fast-talking optimism of basketball whiz Frank McLaughlin. Women's hoop coach Carole Kleinfelder has struggled with it, and more students than one could possibly name have to live with it--unhappily--every day of the year. No one, it seems, has the answer, of how to find sports success at Harvard. And so team records keep getting worse, the results more discouraging, the attitudes more depressed.
Fortunately, this spring has proved an anomaly--a welcomed reprieve. Men's baseball and lacrosse have gained playoffberths and the crews have returned to Eastern Sprints domination after a couple of shaky years. But the rest of the year remains very lean, especially in the beef sports--football, hockey and basketball.
Yes, there have been glimmers along the way: the 22-7 upset of Yale last November in The Game, a 1977 Beanpot Trophy, last fall's women's soccer title, the 1977 women's hoop Division II title, last year's men's hoop upset of Pennsylvania--those are but a few.
Yet those highlights are almost unwelcomed when they breed a belief that Harvard can rise to infinite heights in sports without a basic philosophical shift.
"See," they say, "we beat Yale, and they had the No. 1 defense in the nation." Yes, and there could never have been a sweeter moment. But anyone who suspects such a win foreshadows a move to the ranks of the Big Ten or Pac Eight should submit to therapy.
Harvard University , one can safely predict, will outlast us all. Without a doubt, it will remain an institutional oddity: debates about social responsibility, the relationship with Cambridge, the quality of the undergraduate education and the role of sports seem destined to persist perhaps longer than construction on the Red Line.
But the problem of sports at Harvard--not unlike these other woes--hurts people, Harvard people, as it rages on. There is a great need, in this idealistic academic community, to recognize the drastic limitations an education-oriented school inherently places upon an athletic program.
Though I disagree with much of the rhetoric delivered by Yale President A. Barlet Giamatti, who recently called for the Ivy League to downgrade its recruiting efforts and perhaps abolish playoff competition, I sympathize with the spirit of his remarks. He urges a realistic recognition of what the Ivy League is about, and that is --most of all-scholarly enterprise.
Giamatti, I think, is rightly disturbed by the escalation of competitiveness at his own school and at many other Ivy schools in recent years. The surge is invidious; and it fosters such inflammatory accusations as those made about Yale accepting football players with a blatant disregard for their academic records, or Penn doing the same for its basketball dynasty, or Princeton prostituting itself to admit superb women athletes, or Harvard pressuring professors to show some leniency for athletes who perhaps aren't spending all that much time in Lamont or Widener.
True or false, such barbs are damaging, and their increasing frequency damages the reputation of the Ivy League, nurtures smug remarks about how the Ivies have their own little sports scandal.
If Harvard is to serve its students, it will have to take an assertive role in the years to come: either shrug off the academic ideals and turn to athletic mass production; or step in, stop the win-at-all-cost attitude now taking hold, and restructure the athletics program to a level compatible with Ivy League education. Right now, rigorous sports programs prevent many athletes form enjoying the numerous benefits of an Ivy education. It is a tragedy for an athlete to come to Harvard and then never have a chance to soak, up its scholarship because he or she is too busy catching up after endless hours of practice. The school loses out, the team loses out, and most important, the individual loses out.
A. Bartlet Giamatti is right in calling for the Ivy League to work on this situation together. If we are indeed a brotherhood of schools and if our teams are to continue to compete primarily with each other, then we should clarify our collective aims an priorities.
As Ivy teams expect more and more that they will have a shot at the golden ring on the national sports merry-go-round, the pressures and the frustration mount. It is a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle that must be dealt with now, before too many more athletes drift throught the Ivy League--and through Harvard--retaining a bitter aftertaste for college life. Such disillusion should not be passively endured, especially not in the Ivy League, where you are told to expect Utopia.
THE GLORY, that trite "thrill of victory," is indeed rewarding. but in the Ivy League, and here at Harvard, the cost of such glory has risen dramatically; and, as seems fashionable these days, the price just keeps climbing. Unfortunately, the Harvard leadership has taken the same type of approach to athletics as Jimmy Carter has taken to the economy: a sort of wide-eyed, respectfully distressed puzzlement, one that lacks any true definition of action and invites an accompanying rampage of rising costs.
If Harvard is to fight "victory inflation," it will need someone, or a group of someones, to confront the issues. I hope they have cut deep--stinging members of the Ivy League community. I know I bristled when I first heard them--my impulse was to berate Giamatti, to endorse the "I love you, coach; I'd beat my mother for you, coach" attitude which can pervade athletics. That attitude just does not work; I suspect it's not very useful anywhere, but especially not in the Ivies or at Harvard.
Athletes have compared a great victory to the grandest of emotions--it's like reaching the top of Mt. Everest or flying over the Grand Canyon. "It's sublime," they say. "You can't describe it." But true to the old cliche, winning in the Ivy League has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it's time we stepped back and realized just how absurd the game we're playing has become.