Other teams are not exempt from peculiar crises.

Men's soccer manager Alexandra Barstow '88 arranged the soccer team's NCAA tournament trip to Connecticut. on short notice. "You don't know about it until the week before," Barstow says. "I was calling home to my mother and getting her to look things up in the phone book for me."

Other kinds of scheduling can be a problem. Women's water polo manager Janie Rangel '90 knows this very well. "We haven't got a set schedule," Rangel says. "Football has a set schedule two years in advance. Sometimes I don't know who we're playing until I get there."

And during a critical Harvard-Dartmouth basketball game played in leaky Briggs Cage, one manager not only had to keep score of the game but had to fight the forces of nature. Otherwise, one slip could determine the outcome. "There were lines of water across the floor and I had to find people to help me clean up water between plays," men's basketball manager Monica Phillips '90 recalls.

Many times, the manager has to serve as statistician. Lorraine Lago '90, the manager of the women's lacrosse team, had never seen a lacrosse game in her life. "It was the first time I went away with them. We were at Cornell, and that night the coach and I spent three hours going over videos," Lago says.

In the faster action of men's lacrosse, scoring needs to get straightened out in a hurry. "It's important who gets that assist," men's lacrosse manager Stacey Berg '89 says. "So as they come back off the field, and everybody is congratulating everybody else, I'm having to ask who did what."

Why do they do it? Some do it for the travel. "The weather there was about 10 degrees warmer that it was here, so we were making the big trip to the sun." Barstow recalls of the soccer team's trip to Clemson, S.C.

Some do it for the camaraderie. "I knew I wanted to manage because I enjoyed the feeling of being on a team," Barstow says.

Managing, for some, is now a full--time activity. "I think I could get hit by a bus and have no problem," Peets says with a laugh. "I'd just get back up and walk myself to the hospital."

"It's something I can do in my sleep now," says Colleen Collins '88, manage of cross-country, indoor and outdoor track.

"It adds up to more time than you ever thought it would be," Barstow says. "I knew I would probably end up going to [soccer] games anyway and I thought, 'But I'm going to feel guilty if I know I ought to be writing a paper,' but if I was the manager, I'd have to go."

"I have to go down an hour before the game and buy all the food," Berg says. "By the time I finish doing all the stats, it's two hours after the game is over."

Nobody understands the problems of managing a team better than other managers. So, the managers have formed a group called the Undergraduate Managers' Council to get support and unity among the managers of various sports. The Council is organizing itself along the lines of the old Undergraduate Managers' Council--which disbanded in the early 1970s.

"Every four years or so, someone tries to revive it and it doesn't work out," says Collins, who heads the UMC. "I think managers have their team they're involved with but none of us know each other. I think we can be a great support system."

As an organization, the UMC is recruiting new managers, publishing guidelines and rules to streamline the process of managing and to otherwise unify the managers, according to Collins. Also, the council would be useful to help get rid of old managerial stereotypes, Collins says.