National Visions

Thanksgiving junior year my family took a trip to Plymouth, Mass, and the site where the Pilgrims first landed. Standing on a life-sized replica of the Mayflower, we listened to a tour guide give an impassioned speech on the virtues of our maverick forefathers 400 years ago.

"What do you call a person who dares to go against the grain of everything their native country holds dear, who dares to live by his own code of morality, who dares to live in a different world?," she said, letting the failed actor in her surface.

Pause.

"Harvard students," my Dad ventured.

It was a good response, breaking the embarrassing silence. And like most attempts at humor, it contained an element of truth. Harvard students do live in their own world--for better or for worse. It's a world where students wear blazers to class, "freshman" are "first-years" and the sports teams' visions of grandeur stop at the Pennsylvania border.

Face it, national caliber sports teams are about as common here as a good party.

It's not necessarily the teams' faults, either. No athletic scholarships, low student interest and tough classes are as guilty as anything in this era of big time college athletics. Harvard isn't an athletic power anymore, and it shouldn't be. Given their disadvantages, Harvard teams should be mediocre, with mediocre goals and mediocre frames of reference.

By these standards, Harvard's men's swimming team has been a freak now for a couple of years. While most Crimson athletic teams have fallen from national prominence or have set their sights on local or regional competition, the Crimson has steadfastly striven to enlarge its scope, to burst from the provincial realms of ECAC action and embrace the national scene.

"There's no doubt, our goal is to become one of the best teams in the country," senior distance freestyler Jeff Marks said. "We're trying to focus on larger things."

Harvard proved that on Saturday. The Crimson walked into a home invitational, featuring top-ranked Michigan and and 13th-ranked Florida, and came away unscathed: it took top honors, outdistancing the second-place Gators by more than 40 points.

The win should carry an asterisk after it--a tiny one. Michigan brought only 12 swimmers to the meet, slightly more than half its usual number. But Florida, no cream puff, fielded as many swimmers as Harvard, and the Crimson still won. By a lot.

"The win over Florida was definitely the important thing about the meet," senior Rich Beukema said. "My theory is that they came up here just to pound us into the ground. It ended up working the other way around, though."

The Crimson's national motives were fueled by an upset last year of the then-fifth-ranked Gators. After the win, the squad came to grips with its national potential.

"With that win our expectations for ourselves were raised considerably," last year's captain Richard Ou said. "We realized that we can do some great things."

And the Crimson have. After the Florida win, it cruised through the rest of its season, losing only to Princeton. Its only setback was qualifying only two swimmers for nationals, seniors Tim Carver and Jan Esway.

This seasonm its goal is to qualify eight or ten and finish in the top 10 at nationals.

"Last year we realized that we can be one of the top teams in the country," Marks said. "This year we want to prove it."

With the wins over Michigan and Florida this weekend, the squad seems well on its way.