Halfway There

BASKETBALL coach Tim Cohane feels he's halfway toward his goal of making the Dartmouth men's team a contender in the Ivy League. "It took Yale seven years to get to be a contender; it took Harvard five years; we're in our third year now and halfway there," Cohane said.

The Big Green has posted only four winning basketball seasons in the past 22 winters and will not hit the . 500 mark this year. Through the middle of February, Dartmouth had a 6-13 mark. "I thought we had a chance for a .500 season," said Cohane. "But we lost four of our 12 original players. Two were lost to injuries, one to academics, and one dropped off the team. We've been able to stay right in the game, with the exception of four or five games, but we don't have the experience for the full 40 minutes."

Cohane said he was pleased by the play of senior captain Jon Edwards, a 5-foot 9- inch guard, and sophomore Paul Anderson, a 6-foot 5-inch forward. Both have been scoring just a shade under 15 points per game. The squad lacks a truly big man, and that will be Cohane's number one recruiting priority for 1982-83.

"There are five centers who have applied to Dartmouth. I hope to get one or two of them," said Cohane. "We'll hit the road in March and will know better in the first two weeks of that month what our chances will be." Cohane said that Dartmouth's freshmen and sophomores have dominated the other first- and second-year players in the league, with the exception of Yale's. "If we can continue to recruit, we can get up to the contenders, which is our goal. We're closer to that goal than we were a year ago or two years ago."

Cohane feels that Dartmouth has some unique problems when it comes to basketball. "I doubt that any major college basketball program has more built-in roadblocks than Dartmouth's," he said. "Although this is the best job I've ever had, it's also the toughest. I'm equally convinced that there is not a single one of these roadblocks that cannot be overcome in time. Dartmouth's tremendous heritage in sports will not settle for continued mediocrity in the great game of college basketball." Cohane pointed out that one of Dartmouth's problems "is that it's not close to where good high school players play. The distance makes recruiting difficult. Most good players are urban kids who want to go to a city school. Columbia has New York; Pennsylvania has Philadelphia; Harvard has Boston and Yale is close to the cities. But we are working to overcome that and are making progress."