The Harvard lightweight crew season is already two races old, but the crucial question for 1987--whether Harvard has a strong enough varsity to down Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers for lightweight supremacy--is still as uncertain as ever.

Harvard Lightweight Crew

1986 record: 3-2

1987 record to date: 2-0

(Eastern Sprints on May 10)

On April 4, the Crimson traveled to Philadelphia to face Penn--a race added to the Crimson schedule this year in the hopes of better preparing the oarsmen for crucial late-season matchups.

The race may have been a great idea, but the Crimson looked less-than-impressive in dropping a close finish to the Quakers.

The Harvard boatings had been determined just a day before the race, and the river conditions were extremely choppy, but the 155's didn't perform like the top crew in the land.

"We just didn't go out there and race them," says second-year Lightweight Coach Charlie Butt.

But last Saturday on the Charles, the Crimson came off the line with a controlled fury, and never let up on the way to dusting Dartmouth and MIT.

Neither the Big Green nor MIT IS A lightweight powerhouse, but Harvard still shoe as an altogether different crew--and a much more impressive one--than it was against Penn.

All of which means that, once again in '87, the Harvard lightweights will not know just how good they are until Harvard-Yale-Princeton race-day on April 25, and the Eastern Sprints two Sunday's later.

"The point of getting the early race against Pennsylvania was experience," Butt says. "With our past schedule, we did well early but then got in trouble. So we went South, raced Southern crews that had been on the water for two months, and we got some answers."

And as the Dartmouth race proved, the Crimson took the lessons to heart. "We're going about changing some of those answers, "adds Butt.

Collectively, the members of the Crimson Eight are a relatively untested group. We're a hard crew to characterize," Butt says. "but obviously we're young in terms of varsity experience."