With the Big Green Teams

THIS may be an oversimplification, but there seems to be greater awareness on the part of coaches today for the psychological factors in contemporary athletic contests. This isn't to say there wasn't a good bit of gamesmanship involved in winning games 40 years ago. It simply seems that coaching has become a much subtler profession than it was in the days of Frank Cavanaugh, Jess Hawley, and Dolly Stark.

Take a guy like Karl Michael, now in the final weeks of a superb career as Dartmouth's swimming coach. Here he is trying to get his unbeaten team primed for a super effort against Harvard.

It's Carnival Weekend - the biggest crowd of the season - the fire marshal is about the only guy who didn't get through the door. There is no more vivid memory in the minds of Mike's men than the last affair with the Harvards - when a better Dartmouth team hit Cambridge on a cold Wednesday afternoon last winter and lost its fire while the freshman meet was running its course and ultimately came home a 64-49 loser. Mike and his sidekick, Ron Keenhold, played on that memory for weeks.

On paper, there aren't two better matched teams in the Eastern League this year. With the exception of the diving, where Mike Brown and Bill Thorwarth are as good a one-two punch as you'll find in the East, every event is a pickum. So wily Mike and friend Keenhold spend the. week sifting through a myriad of sheets of times on every Harvard and Dartmouth swimmer. And they come up with the right combinations - although for a couple of minutes they're not sure.

The key to it all looks like Jim Gottschalk, a sophomore from Bedford, Ohio, who is a picture of versatility in a swimming pool. Mike puts his super soph into the opening backstroke leg of the medley relay against Harvard's best sophomore, Dan Kobick. Gottschalk gives the Green a shade of a lead as Jack Dickard takes over for the breastroke leg. By the time Al Rheem hits the water for the butterfly segment, the Indians have a 1.5 second edge and Rheem adds more than two seconds to that and the freestyle is a Walk for Fred Severance.

Chris Carstensen wins the 200 freestyle for Dartmouth two events later but Harvard is creeping back and throws its biggest curve at Mike in the 50 freestyle as the Crimson captain, Mike Cahalen, leads a one-two Harvard finish ahead of Stu Vance, the Dartmouth co-captain who was figured to be at least second. So all of a sudden the Indians are behind. But along comes Gottschalk for the 200 medley.

Now, the week before all this, Gottschalk is down at Princeton where the Indians are in the process of winning a tight 57-56 confrontation with the Tigers. The success included a 2:00.1 time for Gottschalk in the 200 medley - good enough to knock the better part of a second off teammate Al Rheem's record set last year at the NCAA meet.

Well, it's Gottschalk and Rheem against the Harvards and while the skiers are hurtling through the numbing air at the Vale of Tempe, this pair is churning a wake that winds up in a 1:59.5 record win for Gottschalk with Rheem a solid second. By now the rafters are really ringing and the Green is off to the races.

Brown and Thorwarth storm to victory in the one-meter dive. Carstensen, another sophomore from Haddonfield, N. J., gets his second win in the century freestyle with a time of 47.9 seconds and Vance takes Cahalen in the duel for second place. Then it's Gottschalk's turn again and it's more of the same. The event is the 200 backstroke and Kobick is the victim again, this time by nearly two full seconds.

The clinching points came when Jack Dickard took the 200 breaststroke in 2:17.2. That was three seconds better than teammate Dave Freyberg's winning time at Princeton a week earlier when this same pair got the Green a vital one-two. The breaststroke result gave Dartmouth 57 winning points but Mike's men weren't going to settle for a single-point success.

Brown and Thorwarth responded with another one-two in the three-meter dive and then Mike put together a freestyle relay combination of Vance, Severance, Rheem and Carstensen that went 400 yards in 3:11.2, one of the ten best times in the nation this season.

For the record, the final score was 72-41 and the only thing wrong with that is it served notice to Yale that they'd best come to Hanover with their best gang of swimmers. That's not a difficult thing for Yale to do, especially when there are 19 freestylers on the perpetually powerful Yale squad who are faster than anything Mike can throw at them.

There's a little psychology left in the old coach yet, but Mike will be the first to admit that the peak of the season was reached against Harvard. It was the right time and place for a great win and the Indians got it. The road to the cruise through the Crimson was marked with wins over Navy, Army, woefully weak Columbia, Penn, and Princeton.

What lies ahead as the next major objective is the Eastern Seaboard Championship meet on March 12-14 here in Hanover. As usual, Yale rates the favorite's role but Dartmouth shouldn't be too far behind.

And, after three straight seasons of 10-2 records, it's good to know that Karl Michael hasn't lost his touch.

All-American diver Mike Brown fromDenver is a big reason for the swimmingteam's 8-1 record up to date.