Skiers Fall at Easterns After Improved Season

The end of the ski season means one less hassle for some freshmen living in Wigglesworth. Long before the MBTA starts its morning song outside the window, the Harvard ski teams tromp up from the building's basement with their equipment. They leave in the dark, drive across East Somerville to 1-93, and head north in search of snow.

It hasn't been the best year for the white stuff, of course; team member Marco Elser recalls "making sure to stay in the course at Williams, or you'd go off into the dirt." And Eric Alberecht thought it was "distracting" to have to "ski through a stream in the middle of a race" at Cannon Mountain.

But even with little on-snow time, the ski team posted its best record since entering ECAC division 5 in 1976. Senior alpine captain Eric Klaussen led the surge, becoming the first Harvard skier to go to the NCAA nationals in both slalom and giant slalom since 1973.

The cross country team was paced by freshman talents Albert Leger, Tim Allen, and Galen Gawboy.

The numbers--such as Leger's 16th and 18th finishes in his best races, or the team's eighth out of ten finish at the University of New Hampshire and Williams carnivals--may not some impressive. But for a team competing against powerhouses such as Dartmouth, Middlebury, and defending national champions, the University of Vermont, it's not bad.

"When we came in seventh in the cross-country relay at Williams, coaches turned their heads and said 'Harvard? Are you sure?'," one team member said.

Eric Klaussen's story tells the entire season. In his first three years at Harvard, his best race was a fourteenth-place finish. Then he caught fire.

He was sixth after the first run in the Dartmouth slalom, but bombed in the second run. In the giant slalom, he was trying to hold on to a third, fell again in the second run, but pulled a Stenmark and got up, finishing sixth overall.

He did well again at Williams, copping a 5th in the slalom and a 12th in the giant slalom. Alberecht emphasized the feat: "He's skiing against three seniors from Dartmouth who'll probably turn pro next month, with much less training than anyone else."

But at the Eastern Championships at Middlebury last week Klaussen fell in both races, and most of the team scored in the bottom quartile. Harvard fell to the bottom of the Division.

But the team isn't discouraged by its showing, nor by the difficulties it has building a deep squad at Harvard. "Considering our budget and our lack of facilities, we did extremely well," one alpine skier said.

Skiers at Harvard suffer from their distance to the slopes, as do other less proficient urban-based teams. "It's a problem for cross-country skiers too," Carlo Frnzblau notes, adding "We have to drive out of the city just to find steep hills to work out on when there's snow."

Besides not having a ski slope in the back yard like Dartmouth, the Harvard ski team cannot match UVM's $200,000-plus budget.

Unlike many teams, Harvard's skiers pay for their own transportation, lodging, meals, equipment and lift tickets while they train. And there is no coaching provided in the fall. One winter season will cost more than a few hundred dollars. "We're budgeted for about as much as the football teams spends on tape," one member said.

The Athletic Department covers expenses for only the five most important races of the year--the carnivals at UNH, UVM, Dartmouth, Williams and the eastern championships at Middlebury.

"Most people don't realize we have a Division I team," Dave Rothman pointed out. Another ski team member noted that for all the difficulty they had getting on-snow time, "we don't get any notice in the Crimson, the Indy or the Gazette. The Athletic department doesn't even publish our schedule."

Next year promises to be better, at least as far as results go. Number two alpine racer Jay MacLeod broke an ankle early this season and will return to improve on his performance from freshman year. And Klaussen and two other racers will be back next year--to wake up another group of freshmen at 6 a.m. on Saturdays.