The doubles team of Bland-Henikoff, winners of the ITCA Eastern Individual Championships last year, returns along with deLone-Dragomirescu to bolster the squad's strongest area.

Hard Work

"We'll have to work hard to win by a couple shots this year," Krass said. "There are too many teams that have improved since last year. Virginia had a great recruiting year, and William and Mary, Princeton and Dartmouth all look strong."

Rugby

The Harvard Rugby Football Club will be rebuilding with smaller blocks this year.

After years of dominating foes with pure strength and size, the Crimson has to rebuild after seven of its eight forward pack members graduated.

"Basically, the whole forward pack is gone," volunteer Coach Martyn Kingston said. "We had a strong dominant pack over the past few years, one of the best in New England. We had size, and we were able to bully people."

So instead of the knock-down, face-in-the-mud battles Crimson fans may be used to, Harvard will try to speed up the games by getting the ball out to its deep cast of returning backs.

"We return a backline which can get the job done," Co-Captain Scott Tierney said. "It's hard to say what we will look like until we play since we lost so much, but our backs have been around for a while now and that should help."

Among the top backs returning for the Crimson are wing Michael Gibbs, junior Scott Helinski and Tierney.

"Those three have got to be amongst the best in the region at their positions," Kingston said.

Hard-running Dave Beardsley and speedy Annor Ackah also return to the Crimson backfield.

While the backfield will be the focus of the attack, that doesn't mean that the forward pack will be the weak link.

Casey J. Lartigue Jr., Michael Lartigue and Michael Stankiewicz contributed to this report.