Charles W. Altchek ’07, a soft-spoken soccer recruit from Rye, N.Y., mounts his bike outside of Matthews Hall at 8:25 a.m., and heads to breakfast in Annenberg.

Josh M. Lahre ’07, a recruit from San Diego, rides alongside him. They sit down in the dining hall next to four girls—fellow recruits.

Athletes essentially had the campus to themselves for the first week of September, and Altchek says this gave first-year student-athletes more time to get acclimated to Cambridge and college life.

“We all have a leg up on everybody who got here after us,” Altchek says.

Lahre, who with his shaved head and level brow looks like a fair-skinned Billy Zane, says, with a laugh, that it’s been “rough.”

“It’s hard for me to go to sleep when I know there’s stuff going on just on the other side of the door,” he says.

After finishing breakfast, Altchek heads across the river to the athletic training room, to get treatment for a sore knee.

The team’s athletic trainer, Teresa Kennedy, rubs lotion on her hands and massages the tissue around his knee. She says her charge is a “fine athlete” for a newspaper profile.

“How ’bout a fine person?” Altchek says quietly.

“Well you are that too,” she says.

“More important,” he says.

“You’ll even be a finer athlete after our first couple of games, when you put a couple goals in for us,” she says. “Matter of fact, I think you owe me a few goals. If I do soft tissue work on you, boy, you owe me.”

Kennedy follows the team everywhere—Altchek says she’s “like a surrogate mother”—and she’s had her hands full this season. Of 30 players on the roster, more than half had injuries by the third day of preseason, and six players remain hurt.

Altchek hasn’t had a major injury since hurting his back in ninth grade, and he says that he is less vulnerable to injury because of his size. At 6’2” and 195 pounds, he’s one of the most physically imposing members of the team.

“Just by sheer size he’s going to cause havoc in opposing defenses,” says Coach John Kerr. “He has great potential.”