"We shared a lot of problems, academic problems, disciplinary problems," Doyle says of their sophomore year. "We raised hell. The administration didn't know what to do with us. We got to know all the police officers...we were just growing up."

The closeness with his roommates was to be vital in sustaining Doyle during a time of real adversity, injury a devastating injury almost ended the erstwhile star's career.

A broken bone and destroyed ligaments in his left ankle kept Doyle off the volleyball court, and Harvard fell short of the Eastern title it was favored to take. The ankle had to be re-broken. There was rehabilitation, therapy--no surgery, but a lot of frustration that continued into junior year, when he returned able to play, but not as well as he would have liked.

"I couldn't perform--I just wasn't playing up to what I should have been," he says now, still sounding frustrated. The rooming group had been split up, with Doyle and Mielach sharing a double one floor below the other roommates, and the team wasn't a close group. "Off the court was fine, but on the court, nobody was together." On April 1, toward the end of a season that seemed to have gone on forever, he quit the squad.

"I felt like I cheated [Coach] Ishan [Gurdal]. He worked with me for two years and then I went and got hurt on him," says Doyle. "I lost control in volleyball junior year--and I regret doing it because it's the only time I've ever quit. I think that's why I stayed at Harvard--I couldn't quit."

* * *

A sign of the closeness between roommates is the way they support each others' teams. This year, the four varsity athletes and Krusz--a varsity basketball and baseball manager and intramural street hockey star--have been one another's biggest fans.

They traveled to Philadelphia in November via the Musselman house and Atlantic City, then met the football team at the airport when the squad arrived to play Penn for the Ivy League title. They exchanged high-fives with Coaches Joe Restic and Mac Singleton, even waved a banner--but, unfortunately, to no avail.

In the spring, they amused baseball funs all over the East by cheering on Maspons and Musselman. During a rainstorm between games at Dartmouth, when Harvard desperately needed a win to tie for the league title, Doyle and Krusz broke up the tension with an impromptu wiffle ball game on the field. "We go in for rain delays," Doyle explains.

Between those seasons came volleyball, in which Doyle was finally able to put it all together. He'd been working out with Mielach after football ended, insisting all the while that he didn't want to return to his own sport.

Last fall, Doyle says, "I was just gonna be a socialite. I wasn't gonna play volleyball, I was just gonna enjoy myself." But to his own surprise, he found he could once again enjoy himself on the volleyball court.

In midseason, after one of the co-captains had quit the squad, Doyle approached his coach. "I called Ishan to the side one day and said, 'I'm enjoying the game a lot. Will you let me be the [on-] court captain?" he recalls. "He said, 'I've been waiting for you to ask me that.'"

With a new combination and strategy, suddenly the team came together, on and off the court, and enjoyed one of its finest seasons in years. The Crimson won the Ivy League title, besting nemesis Princeton for the first time in two years, and just narrowly missed the NCAA competition.

Again the roommates' presence in the stands was crucial. "We'd have him laughing on the court," says Krusz, who was there so often he was made an assistant coach. "Jeff, John, Mick and Pete were my biggest fans," Doyle says. "They made me a lot more intense. When you have fans yelling like they did, you don't want to let them down.

"Those kids pushed me--not to play well, but to play as well as I possibly could."