News from the Crimson front:

Patricia Miller and Jim Stoeckel will each tackle the position of assistant director of athletics starting September 1.

Miller currently coaches and teaches at North Penn High School in Lansdale, Pa. She will be the University's official representative to the AIAW and other women's athletic organizations.

Stoeckel, who last year filled the post of liaison between the admissions office and the athletic department, will continue in that capacity and take on expanded duties. He also keeps his position as assistant coach of the successful Crimson baseball squad.

Miller packs a good dose of administrative experience. She helped organize the 1979 National Sports Festival at Colorado Springs and the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. She also served on the Curriculum Development Committee under the auspices of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which developed athletic programs for school children.

An All-Ivy quarterback in 1972 and 1973 and an All-East shortstop in 1973, Stoeckel blitzed the Harvard sports scene as an undergraduate. He was Ivy football player of the year and recipient of the Swede Nelson award for sports-manship in 1973. Among the records he still holds are most completions and attempts in a game (27-48), as well as completions and attempts in a season(112-209). He punted more than any other Crimson hoofer--149 times.

Drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1974, he eschewed baseball for football after graduation, flirting briefly with a pro football career. In 1975 and 1975, Stoeckel traveled north to play for the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the Canadian Football League--the very squad coached by Crimson gridder coach Joe Restic before he settled in Cambridge. The Ti-Cats in those days possessed a stellar quarterback by the name of Chuck Ealey.

The decision to add Miller and Stoeckel to the ranks of the athletic department is a good one. Together with Eric Cutler, former women's squash coach and another assistant director, they should give the department a degree of cohesion some say it lacks.

Since Miller will deal primarily with the increasingly important issues of women's sports, and Stoeckel will be charged with ferreting out student athletes possessing athletic and other talents, the department has covered itself in two vital areas of concern.

No comment is needed on the matter of recruiting and its relation to Harvard sports success. We have seen excesses splashed across front pages and sports pages nationwide, and as the University expands its ambitions in certain athletic endeavors--indeed, just tries to keep up with other Ivy schools--the dangers of recruiting are not far from any Crimson follower's mind. Stoeckel, as liaison between admissions and athletics, has perhaps the crucial role in assuring that Harvard treads the tightrope well--without falling into the abyss of excess. Yale president Bart Giamatti, no doubt, will have one eye cocked toward Cambridge after his speech calling for deemphasis of recruiting.

In Miller's realm, disturbing news was made public yesterday, when officials of the Department of Education announced that the newly formed federal bureau plans to act on 124 complaints of sex discrimination in intercollegiate athletics against 84 colleges and universities.

Beginning in October, department investigators will conduct interviews at at least seven schools, including Cornell--a bit close to Cambridge's creeping Ivy for comfort. While Harvard has adhered closely to the spirit of Title IX, there is no telling where a federal bureau might go to make a forcible example. Miller, then, along with director Jack Reardon, will have to stay on top of the University's status on these crucial and sometimes blurry affairs.

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And now, some random reflections on what has surely been a strange summer in the world of sports.

It's a bit redundant to say Jack is back. But I guess he never left. He has copped two major titles in one summer, a season many observers predicted would be the undeniable end of Nicklaus' reign as King. Then, just as Tom Watson and Andy Bean thought it was safe to view for the throne. Jack stopped pulling his putts and collected two major tourneys, knocking the "kids"--by now accomplished pros--back on their butts.