Netmen Finish 4th at ECACs

Harvard's top doubles team reached the doubles finals, but no other Crimson netman advanced beyond the quarterfinal round this weekend as the men's tennis team placed fourth overall at the East Coast Athletic Conference Championships.

The Crimson finished behind West Virginia, Princeton, and Yale in the tournament, which was held in Princeton, N.J., and included 16 teams from around the East coast.

In order to reach the doubles finals, Harvard netmen Arkie Engle and Roger Berry beat a top-seeded team from West Virginia in the doubles semifinals. After falling behind 4-1 in the third set, Engle and Berry rebounded to complete a 6-4, 4-6, 7-5 victory.

In the doubles final, which Harvard Assistant Coach Steve Gerstenfeld called "the highlight of our tournament," Engle and Berry lost to William & Mary's Will Harvie and Scott Mackesy, 6-4, 4-6, 6-7.

"I knew that William & Mary was going to be a good team," Engle said. "You had four really good doubles players playing the match. All the points were won on really amazing shots."

A young Harvard team--which included a freshman and four sophomores--did not do quite as well in the rest of the tournament. After winning the tournament five consecutive years and finishing second in 1986, Harvard's fourth-place showing this year was considered somewhat disappointing.

"Sure it was a little disappointing," said sophomore Mark Leschly, who lost in the second round of "A" singles play to Yale's Bill Benjes and in the first round of "B" doubles play to a Navy team. "We hoped we'd do a little better than we ended up doing."

In the "A" singles division, the third-seeded Engle was upset by Yale freshman Craig Kennedy in the second round, 6-2, 4-6, 1-6. In "B" singles, Berry lost a tough 6-7, 6-7 match to Penn's Dan Levene, dropping both tie-breakers by identical 7-5 counts.

Slip Slidin' Away

In the other "B" singles match, freshman John Cardi let two match points slip away and lost in the second round to Dartmouth's Jeff Hawkins, 7-6, 1-6, 5-7. Ken Hao and Rabi Soni each lost in the "C" quarterfinals to West Virginia players, and the "B" and "C" doubles teams fell in their first rounds of play.

Harvard has been plagued by a rash of injuries, including Co-Captain Paul Palandjian's sprained ankle, Hank Parichabutr's bad elbow, and Leschly's sore shoulder.

Leschly, though, said that injuries alone were no excuse for a poor performance. "The other teams put up some really great players and played really well," he said. "We just suffered some bad losses."