And now, with midfielder S. Ladd Fritz ‘04 temporarily sidelined with an injury, Altchek will get a chance to live up to Kerr’s praise on the starting squad.

“It’s a great opportunity for Charles to earn his stripes,” Kerr says.

His friend Lahre will probably not have such an opportunity—of six first-year recruits, he is one of four defenders.

“In terms of PT [playing time], I don’t count on it,” Lahre says. “It’s hard, I guess, going from a club team where you got all the PT you wanted, where you never came off the field. You show up here and it’s like, ‘No. Now you’ve got to prove yourself.’”

“But I think Kerr’s good at letting us actually show ourselves,” Altchek says. “He plays a lot of us.”

Chemistry Lessons

The team assembles on the field for 10 a.m. practice, the last before the season opener against Vermont and the final chance for the 24 healthy players to secure one of 18 spots on the bus. Another player asks if Altchek remembered his tie, a prop for a practical joke on the coach.

David A. Williams ’07, another freshman recruit, cannot believe he missed the e-mail letting players in on the joke.

“I checked it at two this morning!” he says. A few of the upperclass players also missed the cue, but it’s clear the first-years have learned one thing this morning—you can’t check your e-mail frequently enough.

The team can play jokes on each other, Altchek says, because “the chemistry’s so good.”

Altchek says that chemistry is one of the main reasons he applied to Harvard, even though he didn’t meet the team until the day before the early application deadline.

At Brown, one of only two schools Altchek considered besides Harvard, he says a few standout players got special treatment, but he says Kerr treats his players equally.

At Columbia—the other school he looked at—Altchek would have had to travel 40 blocks to get to the field.

“It’s so nice to just be able to ride my bike to the field every day,” he says, adding that he wanted to leave New York when he went away to college.

Altchek, a graduate of Horace Mann, chaperoned kids from a low-income neighborhood to New York City’s museums and zoos through a community service program he ran, and says he intends to continue his service work at Harvard.