The close relationship between admissions officers and coaches ensures that extra attention is paid to recruits' applications--especially those recruits, like a goalie, who would fill key needs on a team.

But although special consideration is given, coaches say even much-wanted players are continually rejected.

This difficulty of finding recruits who can meet admission standards, however, greatly varies by sport.

Coaches and administrators alike say much of this variation is the result of the different backgrounds of players in the various sports.

"You look at men's basketball and where the best players in that sport are coming from, and it is unlikely that you're going to find as wide a pool of qualified applicants as you'll find in women's soccer," says Tim W. Wheaton, the varsity women's soccer coach. "The dominant women's soccer programs around the country come from primarily suburban, affluent, educationally-oriented areas and homes, with kids who would be applying to Harvard even if they didn't play soccer."

As a result, prep-school teams such as squash and crew tend to draw players who combine athletics and academics.

In contrast, sources close to the athletic department say that in his first year here Murphy was constantly frustrated when the admissions office rejected many athletes he considered qualified.

These rejections are not entirely the responsibility of the admissions office. Harvard is constrained in who it can admit in many sports by an Academic Index instituted in the 1980s to combat charges that academic standards for athletes were declining.

"My sense of what was happening in the league was that there was a perception that some schools were cheating," Reardon says. "In a way it was like working In Washington during the Cold War, where you always assumed the worst of the other side and so you lowered your own standards."

The academic index breaks down athletes' standardized test scores and high school class ranks to assure they are above a minimum standard. Each applicant is rated in three categories. SAT I, SAT II (formerly achievement tests) and class rank.

The admissions office averages an applicant's two best SAT I scores, then divides the resulting number by ten. An average score of 1200, for instance, becomes a 60.

The same procedure is applied to the average of applicant's three best SAT II scores and their class rank, which is approximated onto a scale of 1 to 80. The three resulting scores are added together to create an applicant's index.

The highest possible index is 240, and the College average is 210. The minimum index Ivy League schools will accept is 161, although exceptions are sometimes made for students with compelling non-athletic reasons.

"The main idea of the index is that we want to have people who are representative of the student body as a whole," Fitzsimmons says. "What the Ivy League does not want is to have athletes way over their heads. The goal is to have athlete graduation rates representative of college-wide graduation rates."

The academic index extends beyond individual qualifications, and operates on a team-wide basis for football, men's hockey and men's basketball.