Ivies to Disobey NCAA's Orders In Track Battle

The eight Ivy League colleges last night disrupted the bureaucratic battle for control of ainateur track by announcing that their athletes will compete in meets this winter without regard to who sponsors the competition. Yale athletic director Delaney Kiphuth announced the decision in New York.

The Ivies thus became the first colleges to defy a memorandum circulated last month by the National Collegiate Athletic Association telling colleges, in effect, to keep their athletes out of meets sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union.

The NCAA, which had occasionally argued with the AAU over the details of meets, organized a rival body two years ago to fight the AAU for control of amateur track and field.

The NCAA's current position is that college athletes should compete only in meets sponsored by this rival group, the United States Track and Field Federation.

The Ivies violated this beginning last night, when Yale entered a team of 12 men in an AAU-sponsored development meet in New York.

Harvard's first confrontation with these rules will come on Jan. 16, when the track team is scheduled to enter the Knights of Columbus games at the Boston Garden. Two years ago, when the NCAA first ordered colleges to stay out of AAU meets, Harvard stayed out of the K of C meet.

"Our Athletes Not Weapons"

A spokesman for the Department of Athletics said last night that the Ivies' decision was "not anti-NCAA any more than it's anti-AAU. We're simply saying that we don't want our athletes used as weapons in this fight.

"We'll enter AAU meets; I suppose we'll enter USTFF meets too. If both of them put some penalties on us, we might seek an expanded dual-meet schedule with some intersectional meets. But the only thing that can come out of this is good for Harvard track."

The question of possible penalties is a complicated one. The NCAA has not yet announced any penalties for schools that break its solid anti-AAU front. The group may vote penalties when it meets in Chicago in January.

The Ivies apparently do not believe that the NCAA will ban them from NCAA championship meets. "We don't think they'll ban us from legitimate collegiate competition," Harvard's spokesman said.

The question would ordinarily be academic, but this year's Harvard track team is an extraordinarily good one. Several of its members won places in last year's national championships and might do better this year.

It's even barely possible that the NCAA might remove the controversy from the sphere of track and field by banning Ivy League teams from all NCAA championships--not just track--as a result of the action.

The question is one of "open meets"--meets in which college and non-college athletes both participate. If the Ivies refuse to obey the orders of both the USTFF and the AAU, they might find themselves banned from such competition.

When the feud first broke out two years ago, President Kennedy appointed Gen. Douglas MacArthur as an arbitrator to try to settle the dispute in time for the Tokyo Olympics. The NCAA and the AAU declared a truce, but with the Olympics out of the way, war broke out again with the NCAA's memorandum.

The Eastern College Athletic Association, composed of most of the NCAA's eastern members, voted last night in favor of a compromise plan, supported by the Ivy colleges, that would leave the sanctioning of open meets up to a committee on which the NCAA and the AAU would have equal representation. The AAU would retain control over international meets