Basketball Squad Faces Tough League Schedule

Basketball, which attracts huge crowds, pretty cheerleaders and professional gamblers at other schools, is usually a rather dead sport at Harvard. Last year the team tied for seventh in the Ivy League, and has never won the championship.

But hope springs eternal and all that, and this year's rendition of Coach Floyd Wilson's dauntless dribblers appears to have a brighter future than its predecessors.

The only senior on last year's team was captain Bob Chowditch. That leaves nine lettermen and a promising crop of sophomores, which had a 13-1 record as freshmen. Wilson still has four sophomores on the varsity, assigning the rest to the junior varsity where they will play an expanded 15 to 18 game schedule.

Offense Not a Problem

Offense is not really a problem. The Crimson has several fine shooters, especially captain Gary Borchard, senior guard Joe Deering, and juniors Pete Kelley and Denny Lynch. Wilson is now playing Borchard and Lynch as forwards on the first team, with senior Bill Danner, at center.

Deering will start at one guard position, but finding a second one is a problem. Wilson is currently experimenting with Sid Davis, captain of last year's freshman team, junior Rene Augustine, and senior Tom Tangeman, who has been shifted from the front to the backcourt this year.

The second team front court now includes Kelley and sophomores Lenny Strauss and Bob Inman. In an intra-squad trimmage earlier this week the Kelley-Strauss-Inman lineup "clobbered" the first string according to Wilson, and he is still unsure of the definite starting lineup.

But if offense is not a great problem the defense is. The spectacle of rival shooters penetrating the Crimson defense with monotonous regularity must be eliminated if the team is to have any success at all.

Team Defense

Wilson this year will try what he describes as a "team defense," which means sort of a collapsing man to man zone. Anyway, it will have to be damn good. Princeton, last year's champion, and second place Penn, are really fine basketball teams and should fight it out among themselves for the title. Brown, too, appears beyond the rest of the league, though not in a class with Penn or Princeton.

But after those three the league is pretty even, and, if the Crimson can find a second guard and tighten up its defense, it could make some noise. Look what happened to the football team.

(Next: Swimming.)