Creme de la Cramer

The rumpled jersey and the battle-scarred helmet wouldn't give it away. Neither would the powerful skating nor the sexless "L. Wood" that would appear in the morning paper's boxscore.

And Lucy Wood, the first woman ice hockey player in intramural history, likes it that way.

Wood, a wing on the championship Kirkland House hockey squad who traded figure skates for hockey blades, finished the season with no points and no minutes in the penalty box. But for the sophomore who plays field hockey in the "on-season," this winter's campaign was a tremendous success.

Wood brushes off her role with the unbeaten Kirkland squad, saying "my best thing was a check--it surprised him more than me." But her teammates on the only sex-blind line in Harvard's history, dispute her interpretation. "She's a good skater and a good athlete," Scott McNealy, the center on Wood's line, said yesterday. "I would never hesitate to pass to her."

Kirkland House teams have dominated intramural play this year, and like its unbeaten football squad, K-House's hockey team has a number of good to excellent players. But McNealy insists that Wood is as talented as many of them. "For a power play she would come off the ice for some better players," he says. Yet, for the most part; Wood was worth far more to the team than her only near score--a goal-post deflection she obtained in a recent match against Win-throp--would indicate.

"In the last few games," Wood says. "They've been passing to me much more. I think its because I've been able to switch directions more frequently." Wood credits her skating ability to ten years of pre-college figure work. "I sure wish I could use my figure skates now," she says.

Wood says she didn't brandish the stick for any cause. "I wasn't out there to prove anything." She says, however, that she is "hoping that more girls would play. I would like to play on a girls' line or maybe a girls' team." There are lots of girls teams now, she adds, noting that Dartmouth, Boston College and Boston University all have their own women's squads.

If anything is surprising about Wood it's the dearth of recognition she gets off and on the ice. Asked about Wood's singularity on a team of men, teammate Chuck Cook never went beyond an assessment of her skating ability except to say, "It's not a big issue. It didn't nother me at all."

About her anonymity, Wood says. "I didn't think a lot of people thought I was a girl." A lot of her opponents didn't go after her in the same way as others, she says. But she attributes the hands-off policy to her towering linemates. "I was well protected by a lot of big guys," she says.

"If I had felt any resentment at all from my teammates I would have dropped the game. But there wasn't and I enjoyed it." Wood says. "And now I'm looking forward to next week's match against Yale."