Every team has them.

At a basketball game, they are at the end of the bench, dressed in semi-formal attire. At a soccer game, they are filling in the scorebook or sitting atop the scaffolding, taping the game. They go unnoticed, but they are there.

They are the injured. There is no disabled list for Harvard athletics, but that doesn't mean that hurt players disappear.

Darren Rankin, the captain of the men's basketball team, knows the feeling of sitting at the end of the bench. Midway through last season, Rankin found that his aching back was getting worse and worse. After having it examined, Rankin learned that two vertebrae needed to be removed and a third had to be shaved. For the rest of the season, he wore a coat and tie and sat on the bench.

"The doctor was surprised to see me walking," Rankin says. "He definitely laid it out--he didn't think that I should play at all."

Rankin got opinions from other doctors, who said that he could hit the court again after extensive therapy. So rehab he did, and now he can play about 10 minutes at a time--on a good day.

Kim Vender would say that Rankin is lucky, despite his 10-minute limitations.

Vender, a sophomore, learned last January that she has a herniated disc--an ailment that causes the discs in one's spine to flip out of place. The injury forced Vender to stop swimming forever, an activity that she's done practically since birth.

"It was really difficult for me--it's still difficult for me," Vender says. "All of a sudden I couldn't do anything."

A Desire to Continue

It seems that all injured athletes share Vender's desire to continue playing. It's rare for a Harvard varsity player to have a mild injury and quit.

Brad Konik, the current captain of the men's hockey team, missed a season and a half of play due to bruised cartilage in his knee. Konik was injured in November of 1992, when a Brown shot hit his knee cap.

Konik continued to play into December, before the pain forced him to stop. Then, he took two semesters off from school and spent it rehabilitating his knee.

"For the whole time they weren't able to tell me [how long I'd be out]," Konik says. "Instead, they'd say it could be two weeks, it could be two months or it could be never."

Nevertheless, Konik was determined to come back and did so successfully in the fall of 1994.