Skiing Review

AT THE BEGINNING of the season Coach Walter Prager said that he wanted to build up an all-around team, rather than one dependent on one or two stars. He did more than that. He built a hard-working and fast-skiing team that, though not the greatest in Dartmouth history, shook off early season losses at Lake Placid and Carnival to defend successfully Dartmouth's intercollegiate skiing supremacy.

The week before Christmas, in the Franconia Amateur Cross-Country and Slalom Training Meet, Bob Meservey, captain of the 1943 freshman team, and Captain Charlie McLane, one of the two remaining lettermen of 1940, won respectively the slalom and langlauf. Then came the Lake Placid Intercollegiate Ski Tournament in which Dartmouth was out-pointed by a well-balanced New Hampshire squad. With too little snow for the downhill, McLane's first and second and Meservey's fifth and fourth in the langlauf and slalom could not compensate for Dartmouth's failure to score in the jumping.

In one of the scattered meets before Carnival, Meservey took first honors on Mt. Cranmore in the Eastern Slope Giant Slalom, but New Hampshire led in team scoring. McLane won the amateur division of the Vermont Slalom Championships, with only Walter Prager turning in a better time, and led his team to victories in the Massachusetts Downhill Championships and the Williams Winter Carnival. Rog Simpter jumped for a third in the Class A of the New Hampshire ABC meet.

On February 7-8, Dartmouth skied against the teams of New Hampshire, Middlebury, McGill, Wisconsin, Harvard, Norwich, Vermont, Chile, and the Royal Norwegian Air Force on its own icy hills in an attempt to keep for the seventh consecutive time its Carnival title. McLane raced the downhill on Moose Mt. in record time, but in the afternoon the Dartmouth captain collapsed from a touch of the flu when leading the field by four minutes in the langlauf. Saturday, McLane was second to Doug Mann on an icy slalom course on Suicide Six, with Meservey fourth. The afternoon saw Rog Simpter first in the jumping, but New Hampshire had scored enough points in the combined jumpinglanglauf to compile the best team score and take the Carnival title back to Durham.

The next week end, Dartmouth avenged the Wildcat victory by winning the Middlebury Carnival with only three men of the Dartmouth Carnival team competing. The following week saw Dartmouth repeat its triumph by edging New Hampshire by .93 points to win the all-important Intercollegiate Ski Union Championships. After New Hampshire had swept the langlauf, Simpter again won the intercollegiate jumping title, Tobin and McLane the downhill, and McLane and Meservey the slalom to retain Dartmouth's intercollegiate title.

The Dartmouth squad then went on to Mont Tremblant to renew its traditional rivalry with McGill and clinch its claim to North American skiing supremacy. Meservey starred, winning both the downhill and slalom. His teammates backed up his perfect score in the combined downhill and slalom, McLane taking third behind McGill's Doug Mann, and Salm, Tobin, and Nunnemacher, fourth, fifth, and eighth, to bring Dartmouth its most decisive win of the season.

On March 9-10, the "A" team, composed of McLane, Meservey, Salm, and Tobin, won three important titles: the Appalachian Mountain Club Trophy, and the Hochgebirge and the Eastern Downhill and Slalom Championships. Jake Nunnemacher, Pat Reily, Bob Fry, and Don Worden, making up the Dartmouth "B" team, took third in all three events.

Now, with Coach Prager and McLane en route to Sun Valley, another successful skiing season is almost over. Despite the graduation of Captain McLane, Little, Salm, and Worden, and the probable loss of Walter Prager to the army, next year's squad will have another.

DOUBLE TITLE-HOLDER Don Blount, senior from Providence, R.I.,who captured both the high-jump andbroad-jump championships in the indoorintercollegiates at New York. His winningleap in the high jump set a new Collegerecord.