With the Big Green Teams
BY APRIL 1 two Dartmouth spring teams will have begun their seasons and one winter team will still have one more event on tap. For the rest, winter sports will definitely be over, and spring athletics will still be in the last stages of early warm-up.
Already under way will be Tony Lupien's baseball team and Whitey Burnham's lacrosse squad, while Karl Michael's best-in-years swimmers will be preparing for a splashy fadeout April 6, 7 and 8 at the American Athletic Union (AA.U.) meet in Dallas. Among the warm-ups will be the crew, competing this year for the first time as a full-fledged DCAC sport.
All athletic roads had pointed south since mid-March, when term's end and spring vacation gave Green teams a chance for an annual workout under warmer skies from Kent, Conn., to the Bahamas.
The overall picture for spring looked better than had the winter sports scene. Workouts under the protective roof of Leverone Field House gave athletes a chance to polish up teamwork and individual performances, while the coaches sized up the situation and switched around for maximum effect.
Meanwhile, the winter season had wrapped itself up as follows:
The swimming team ended the regular dual-meet season with ten victories and two defeats, the best record since the 11-1 season of 1950. Along the way the team set a rash of College records and finished fifth at the Eastern Seaboard Intercollegiate Swimming Championships at Yale.
Next year's team will have much the same roster, and this year's freshman swimmers will be ready to help out with performances that many times equalled those of their varsity colleagues.
Other varsity sports, excluding skiing, had a long winter. Basketball statistics showed a 7-win, 17-loss record, the hockey team won 4 and lost 16, squash was 2 and 10, wrestling was 3 and 5, and track was 1 and 7.
Coach A 1 Merrill's ski team swept the four big winter carnivals, won the Eastern championships, and ended up in third Place in the NCAA competition.
Freshmen fared better in several areas. The basketball team won 19 games and lost 2, and the hockey team won 14 and lost 5.
Of special note were Dartmouth performances in the big swimming and track meets the second weekend in March.
Dartmouth's 198 points in the ESISC at the Yale swimming pool were the most the Green has ever scored in the event. Yale ran away with first with 389½ points, North Carolina was second with 241, Army third with 222½ and Princeton fourth with 206½, only 8½. points in front of Dartmouth.
Although Dartmouth scored no first places, new College records were set by Brad Lindeblad with 21.4 seconds in the 50-yard freestyle and 47.4 seconds in the 100-yard freestyle, by Allan Petersen with 55.6 seconds in the 100-yard backstroke, and by the 400-yard freestyle relay team with a time of 3:10.7. Team members were Terry Robinson, Morgan Allsup, Lindeblad, and Tony Dalrymple.
In the Heptagonal Track Meet at Cornell, Chester Halka won the high jump with a leap of 6 feet 8 inches, and Harris Wagenseil took third in the pole vault with 14 feet 6 inches. This gave Dartmouth 9 points and a seventh-place finish ahead of Penn, Brown and Columbia.
Turning to spring sports, the outlook just before the spring vacation trips was like this:
