The Harvard men's tennis team should have won the New England Championship tourney this weekend at Yale. It had beaten the top-ranked opponents--Yale and Brown--last weekend.

But instead the netmen came home sharing the title with the Elis, and though a shared first is still a victory, most of the team is not overly enthused.

"I think we were a better team," sophomore Dave Beckman said. "We proved that before in dual competition. And it could have gone the other way if we had gotten better draws, and made it to more doubles finals."

It was the doubles matches that sealed the Crimson's tie with the Elis. In A division doubles. Warren Grossman and Rob Loud, replacing Harvard's usual first doubles pair, played what Loud termed their "worst tennis all season," and went down in the semifinal round of play to a Boston University pair.

Missed Bid

"That was discouraging," Harvard Coach Dave Fish said. "But that happens at least once in the season, they'll learn from that." Fish added that the pair might have been looking ahead to the finals, where they would have met Yale's number one pair, had they won them, they could have gained a possible bid for the NCAA tournament later this month. Loud voiced his disappointment. "They'll probably choose some team from either Penn or Princeton now," he said.

Even after Harvard's first doubles loss, the C-doubles match between Brown and Yale could have insured a Crimson title. Brown's Scott Diehl and Andy New won the first set of their match, 6-1, but then choked on the next sets, losing, 6-4, 6-2, giving Yale the tie with Harvard. "They were terrible," Harvard's Sy Fountaine commented with disgust. "They won handily, then choked. They were nattering nabobs of nothingness."

The only Harvard pair to make it to the finals of the singles competition was Beckman and team Captain Adam Beren. They won the B-doubles contest by toppling Brown's John Hare and Barry Judge, a team they lost to previously. The doubles win was a second triumph for Beren, following a break from singles action to recover some of his strength after he had lost 15 lbs.

"Adam was playing some super tennis," Fish said. "He is definitely back now, he walked through his last three opponents."

Greatest Since '30

Grossman, playing first singles, made it to the finals and played some of his best tennis of the season against top-seeded Glen Layen-decker, the Eli who recently upset Harvard's Howard Sands (who has been resting since that match). Grossman had beaten Layen-decker earlier in the season, but lost by a few crucial shots in two 7-4 tie-breaker rounds, 6,7,6-7. "Warren played a very high caliber of tennis," Fish said. "To have him play as well as he did and not win says something about Layendecker, who's a real class player with a lot of potential."

THE NOTEBOOK: Harvard will meet Princeton and Cornell in a Thursday-Friday road trip... Harvard faces the Clemson Tigers May 10 in a rare visit by a national powerhouse. Fish calls it "the greatest thing to happen to Harvard tennis since the 1930s."