BASKETBALL

Dartmouth basketball in 1969-70 will be remembered as the year of the sophomores - and for the best record in a decade. Heading into the final two weeks, George Blaney had taken the Green to an 11-10 record. It's a record that has been punctuated with ecstasy and frustration. Utter unpredictability, that's the way the whole season has been.

The dominant sophomore names have been Paul Erland, Jim Masker, and Gary Dicovitsky. They have been starting along with Alex Winn, the senior who at this writing is within inches of becoming Dartmouth's all-time scoring leader, and any one of four other guards.

Erland is the hottest item. The forward from Nashville has been the Ivy League's leading scorer for most of the season with a 21-point average and has come up with important points at most opportune moments.

Masker is a 6-10 center from Vernon, Conn. When he's fully extended for a rebound or for a most effective jump shot, he's one of the hottest items in the Ivy League. His only liability at this point is the endurance to go full tilt for the better part of the game. That will probably be corrected with some conditioning work with Carl Wallin, the weight coach on Ken Weinbel's track staff.

Dicovitsky has' averaged less than three points per game but he's been a tremendously steady influence in the backcourt. He moves the ball well and has established himself as a tenacious defender.

The "ups" of Blaney's first season have far outnumbered the letdowns. There have been great wins over Harvard (twice) and an 87-59 barrage at Yale as Erland scored 25 points while Winn had 24 plus 17 rebounds. The latter success bred greater things in Alumni Gym on Feb. 6 when Princeton came to town and met Erland's 25 points plus a great pressure performance in the backcourt by Dicovitsky and Jerry O'Brien to topple the Tigers, 70-69, in the Ivy League's biggest upset.

Winn's best night of the season might have been against Yale but he was virtually as superb against Connecticut when the Indians overcame a 13-point halftime deficit and won, 88-85. Winn had 35 points and also gathered 15 rebounds.

Two of the losses in the Ivy League were to Penn, well-established this season among the nation's top ten teams, 96-68, and to Columbia, a fixture among the top twenty, 72-58. Penn chose its night in Alumni Gym to play its best game. Dartmouth made 51 per cent of its field goal attempts in the first half but still trailed by 15 points.

Against Cornell, junior guard Joe Cook (the hard-working deadpan guy who recently moved in beside Dicovitsky) had the best night of his Dart- mouth career as he scored 21 points, had 12 rebounds and eight assists as the Indians won, 72-69. It was Cook's four straight foul shots in the final minute that decided the affair.

The disappointments have been losses to Valparaiso (75-73), Boston University (79-74) and to Brown, a 74-66 decision at Providence as the Indians suffered through their worst shooting night of the season.

The chief losses from this year's squad will be Winn and Captain Greg Pickering, who has been an outstanding team leader while playing a reserve role behind Masker. The rebuilding process is continuing. It's going on at Dartmouth and just about everywhere else in the Ivy League. It was Sports Illustrated that made the observation in a February issue that at the rate things are going, there soon will be as many Ivy Leaguers listed in the NationalBasketball Association Guide as there are in Standard & Poor's.

A. B. Street '18Kent Nyberg (8) scoring one of his two goals against Yale in the contest at NewHaven that Dartmouth won 10-6 during its best winning streak of the year.