Whenever a championship was on the line for the Harvard women's track team, co-captain Brenda Taylor did everything she could to boost the Crimson's chances of victory.

In a typical Heptagonal meet, Taylor was capable of running three individual events, as well as a relay or two, and winning them all. Fittingly, she was named the Outstanding Performer for both the Indoor and Outdoor Heptagonal meets this past season.

But despite Taylor's heroics, the Crimson still came up just short of perennial Ivy power Brown at the Indoor and Outdoor Heps this season, falling 120-110 in the winter and 132-121 in the spring.

"Brown's a clutch team and they perform well under pressure," said Taylor, whose twin sister Lindsay is the co-captain of the Brown team. "But do I continue to think we had a stronger team? Yes."

The defeats at the hands of Brown were hardly representative of the greatness of this year's Harvard track team.

"The competition is so amazing now," Taylor said. "It's strong in every single event. In past years we would have won by 50 points with this performance. It just happens that both of us [Harvard and Brown] have more people than we did last year."

The Crimson's strength lied principally in perhaps the greatest senior class in school history, led by co-captains Taylor and Marna Schutte and Olympic high jumper Dora Gyorffy.

Schutte won her fourth consecutive Outdoor Heptagonal title in the 400-meter dash, a feat matched by none other than two-time Olympian Meredith Rainey-Valmon `90.