A Great Weekend

Laying out a back page in the fall is usually an easy task: put football at the top, put the winners of other sports at the bottom and bury the losers inside.

Many times at Harvard the losers take up a little extra space, creating a minor dilemma, but there is never much of a problem: at least the women's tennis team is guaranteed to win.

This week, however, lay-out has been faced with an unusually pleasing dilemma. Of the ten teams featured over the previous two days, seven garnered significant victories over the weekend. All seven merited top-of-the-page billing on an average day. From top to bottom, it was the best Harvard sports weekend I have seen.

Four stories in particular deserve special emphasis here.

The top story over the weekend--and maybe over the fall--was the men's golf team's incredible first-place finish at the ECAC championships. The squad was arguably the last-seeded team in the 21-team tournament, but still came away with an 11-stroke win.

No one would have guessed it at the beginning of the season, except for maybe the team itself, but the Crimson is now a legitimate eastern power.

The second biggest story from the weekend was the football team's 35-27 comeback win over Colgate. OK, it was only Colgate, but the nature of the win merited attention: two fourth-quarter touchdowns by a quarterback whose last name would suggest a blood relationship to Jack Kevorkian is no mean accomplishment.

In addition, coming before the heart of the Crimson's Ivy season, it was a big, big moral victory.

The third story worthy of special mention was the women's cross country team's first-place finish at the H-Y-P meet. Granted, it wasn't a division or even Heps championship, but the H-Y-P meet is one of Harvard's grandest, if least-hyped, sporting traditions.

In addition, it was the first time in eight years that Harvard has won the meet, and it gives the squad a great deal of confidence going into Heps two weekends from today.

The fourth and final big story from the weekend might have gone unnoticed to even the most scrupulous sports page reader. The Harvard women's volleyball team garnered two big wins over the weekend, beating Columbia on Friday and Cornell on Saturday.

The Columbia game was significant, if only because it was a win. The Crimson has struggled throughout much of this season despite an outstanding crop of freshman players. Its come-from-behind 12-15, 15-9, 15-7, 15-8 win over the lowly Lions showed that the team could both play as a team and bounce back from an early deficit.

That win, though, paled by comparison to the squad's breathtaking 15-6, 14-16, 15-5, 15-13, 15-11 win over Cornell the next day. The Big Red has been the class program in the league, winning the last three league championships.

The win was the equivalent of the Cincinnati Bengals beating the Dallas Cowboys. It showed that the Crimson program is on an inexorable rise, gradually working its way up among the top teams in the east.

With respect to the field hockey, women's soccer and men's soccer teams--all of whom had exceptional weekends with wins over Yale--those were the top stories from a memorable three days.

A warm thanks goes out to all those who participated: it was the sort of weekend that makes collegiate sports writing worthwhile.