Winter Sports Need Transfusion

HANOVER winters have been getting longer and colder for students and fans of Dartmouth athletic teams.

Big Green squads have been in doldrums probably unequalled in Dartmouth annals. A survey of won-lost records of winter teams during the four years here of the Class of 1964 illustrates this.

Here are some samples:

Over this recent four-year span only the varsity swimming team is over the .500 mark . . . and just barely there by a 23-21 count.

Hockey has the next best record, an even 42-42 tally. Track is 11-19, squash is 15-30, and basketball is down at the bottom with a 20-78 mark.

More important, how have the Indians done in Ivy League competition, the test against their supposed equals? The answer is not good.

The hockey team is the only squad (omitting the skiers for the purpose of this article) to have won a league championship in the last four years.

In fact, the Green skaters are the only winter team to have finished in even the first division of the league in this span. They jumped from last place in 1963 to first place last year.

Basketball, since the glory days of LaRusso, Kaufman and Vandeweghe in the late '50s, has dropped with a thud. The Green has been dead last in the Ivy set the past two seasons and appears headed for the same fate this year.

The swimmers generally have finished sixth in the Eastern League with 3-5 records. Their point totals in the Eastern championship meet have been gradually dwindling until they were shutout completely while hosting the meet here last March.

A similar dropping off is apparent in track and squash. The latter team used to lose to the Big Three regularly but still manage to hang on to fourth place in the six-team Ivy squash competition by beating Cornell and Penn. But last year these two upstarts handled Dartmouth easily and the Indians tasted last place for the first time in the history of the league. "

Track had a fine campaign in the winter of '61, posting a 5-1 dual meet record and winding up fifth in the Heptagonals (the Ivy League plus Army and Navy). But the increased competition has been evident since. There hasn't been a winning season in the past three and the Green dropped to eighth in the Heps last winter with only six points.

That is the sad story. What is the cause? And the solution?

Says Athletic Director Red Rolfe, "There is no doubt that the competitive level of the Ivy League in winter sports has improved. We have been late in catching up with the others as the record shows. But we're beginning to make up for it with new facilities, improved enrollment work for winter sports, and some alumni help.

"Examples of the Ivy improvement? Cornell has jumped ahead fast in hockey by looking for Canadian students. They have 17 Canadians on their 22-man varsity hockey squad this winter and another very strong freshman squad coming up. Cornell has beefed up its squash and tennis program and its track, basketball and wrestling programs are very healthy.

"Brown has improved tremendously in track and hockey. Penn is maintaining its basketball strength and improving in squash. Princeton has gone ahead in swimming since Bob Clotworthy (former Dartmouth assistant) became coach.

"Frankly, we used to be in the middle of the pack or on top in many of these winter sports but now these other schools have moved ahead.

"With our academic standards so high, we no longer can sit back and compete on a 'take them as they come in' basis. We have to seek out the boy that combines excellence as an athlete with academic ability.

"I hope our alumni will help us to regain our athletic prestige. We need the outstanding boys, the Bill Bradleys, the Billy Kings. True, the competition is terrific for this type. But if alumni will call our attention to them, we'll follow up and find out if they qualify academically."

Rolfe emphasized that the primary purpose of Dartmouth is educational and that all scholarship assistance for qualified boys is based on financial need.

"But within this framework we are very definitely seeking out the top scholar-athlete for Dartmouth," he added. "Football has overshadowed some of our other major sports recently. We plan to devote more attention to enrollment work, with emphasis on all sports and not just football."

This year the administrative load of enrollment work with secondary school athletes has been taken off the shoulders of track coach Ellie Noyes and put in the hands of Seaver Peters '54.

Pete, a former Dartmouth hockey captain and associate director of athletics in charge of physical education and intramural sports, is a hard-working man with optimistic hopes for improving the winter teams quickly.

"We are centrally organized with a file system for outstanding schoolboy scholar-athletes. Now I think we've got to get our coaches on the road more and calling on these boys. And we hope to get our athletically inclined alumni organized by geographic regions to tell us about these boys. Maybe one man in each area could be the liaison with the athletic staff and other Dartmouth men be organized under him for specific help," says Peters.

Both Rolfe and Peters point to swimming as an example of how this system can work. Coach Karl Michael last year contacted Dartmouth swimming alumni around the country asking for their advice on academically qualified swimmers. Assistant coach Ron Keenhold got on the road, visited the schools and candidates, dug up some more names on his own. There were 160 applications from able schoolboy swimmers; 33 were accepted to Dartmouth and 18 are now in the freshman class. Recently that freshman swimming team broke four Dartmouth College records and seven Dartmouth freshman records, and tied another in a meet with Harvard. The meet went down to the final leg of the final relay with Harvard winning by about two seconds.

"Harvard," says Red Rolfe, "has proven that its athletic program can be improved with alumni help. It uses organizations such as the Friends of Harvard Track and Friends of Harvard Hockey to seek out the top scholar-athlates and steer them toward Cambridge. And the record shows that Harvard has had the top victory percentage in Ivy League competition for seven consecutive years. In fact, over the past four years Harvard has piled up a record against Dartmouth of 56 victories against only 10 defeats. Last year Harvard won 14 out of 16 varsity events against us. This is the most lopsided series Harvard had against any Ivy opponent."

"This alone should serve as an incentive to Dartmouth to get back where it belongs in the Ivy athletic picture. Our football and soccer teams in the fall and several spring teams have proved to be successful. We have the facilities for equal success in the winter. I hope our alumni will cooperate with us in this venture."