Ask any member of the Harvard wrestling team how his season went, you might get a confused look and a curt reply; "Which season?"

Few times in Harvard's long sports history has a team had as dramatic a mid-season turnaround as the 1993-94 grapplers.

And, fortunately, there have been even fewer times when a team has had the same kind of turnaround as the wrestlers had--a drastic plunge from success to hard times.

The Crimson went 7-4 through its first 11 meets, only to lose its last six by wide margins.

"All in all it was a rough year," senior tri-captain Steve Aoki says. "We were going well for a while, and then everything seemed to go wrong. It was a pretty bad finish."

Pretty bad indeed. Of all the things that went wrong for the team, two stand out.

First, the level of competition improved considerably. Gone were the Boston Colleges, Wagners and Bridgewater States that constitituted the first half of the team's schedule, and in were such powerhouses as Rutgers, Cornell and Seton Hall. The team's schedule was as bottom-heavy as a 1920's pin-up model.

And second, the Crimson were plagued by myriads of injuries. Tri captains Aoki, John Drosos and Bill Counihan--arguably the three top wrestlers on the team--were, among others, all out with physical maladies at critical points in the season. The team was never able to regain its flow and put forth its best foot in meets where nothing less was even close to acceptable.

"It was really a combination of things," Aoki says. "It would be nice to go back and see how well we could do if even some of those things didn't go wrong."

The season started out on promising note as the Crimson took two of four matches at the Harvard Invitational on December 11, beating Wagner, 38-6, and UMass-Lowell, 36-13.

Things continued on the right track after winter break, as the team got on a successful streak at home. The squad swept Bridgewater State and Boston College on January 12, and then, after a close loss to East Stroudsberg, beat Princeton and Boston College.

But a scary omen for the remainder of the season came in the team's last home meet, a quadrangular with Penn, Albany and Rutgers on February 5.

The squad was thrashed by the Quakers in the first match, 33-7, tiptoed past lightweight Albany, 25-18, and then was crushed by powerful Rutgers, 40-0.

The rest of the season was all downhill, as the team took to the road. In quick succession, the squad fell at Columbia, 26-15, at Cornell, 40-0, at Boston University, 22-12, at Brown, 24-12 and at Seton Hall, 30-9.

The team then placed 12th at the Eastern Championships at Cornell on March 4-5.