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.”

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.

“Once I get settled in and know what my classes are I’m going to go check it out,” he says.

Altchek says that balancing classes, soccer and community service will not be a problem. After playing for a club team in high school, he says he is used to spending an exhausting weekend playing soccer, only to come home to a teacher who doesn’t care why he’s not ready for an exam.

Ryan C. Johnson ’06, a goaltender, says first-years face several difficult transitions when they join the team because they have to make an impression on their teammates, as well as their coach.

“On top of competing for a spot and being in the most physical pain you’ve ever been in you have to be sociable in your free time,” Johnson says. “For me I was almost a different person, especially pre-season.”

In addition to developing social confidence, Johnson says new players can be overly cautious on the field.

“You might be tentative to do new things beyond the simple ‘get the ball and pass,’ because you’re not sure how the coaches will react,” he says.

The coaches leave it to the team’s veteran members to initiate and welcome the first-years, Johnson says. Though the first-years wore jockstraps over their clothing to every meal during preseason, the team insists that there has not been any hazing.

“They’ve just been treating us as equals,” Altchek says.

At 10:30 a.m., Kerr and two assistant coaches gather the starting 11, including Altchek, and talk strategy.

Lahre walks to the sideline for a drink. He says he is looking forward to joining his entryway for a trip to the North End that night.

Michael T. Sachs ’04, a senior nursing an injury, suggests Lahre might travel with the team that night to Vermont. Lahre smiles.

“I can’t count on that,” he says.

“You’ve got to be confident!” Sachs says. He suggests Lahre injure one of the players at his position. “I did that freshman year.”

Lahre didn’t make the traveling roster for the Vermont game.

Altchek took two shots in Friday’s game, which ended in a 0-0 tie, but he was bumped to the bench as forward Brian L. Charnock ’06 returned to the starting line-up for the Crimson’s 2-1 win yesterday over the University of Rhode Island.

Altchek says he wasn’t disappointed about not starting.

“I was kind of expecting it,” he says.

—Staff writer David B. Rochelson can be reached at rochels@fas.harvard.edu.