Injuries Plague Women's Track Team

Pappy Hunt is hoping. The women's track coach is hoping his runners can make up for a lack of depth this spring. He's hoping the UMass squad that appears at Soldiers Field for tomorrow's season opener will be out of shape. And, most importantly, he's hoping to field a healthy squad within the next two weeks.

Pappy Hunt may be hoping for a miracle. With four of his top athletes hobbled, and two more in his stable now question marks, Hunt will have to do some shuffling and then rely on a talented crop of distance runners to carry the Crimson past UMass. But the Harvard women have never out-dualed a UMass track squad.

Freak accidents have left three of the team's top freshmen in casts or on crutches. Lennie Yagima, the squad's number one long-jumper, was leaving University Health Services (UHS) after visiting a friend last week when she stepped in a pothole; 20 minutes later she was back at UHS with a badly sprained ankle.

That same week, top hurdler Karen Gray stumbled while leaving practice and also sprained her ankle. Then high-jumper Hanna Cox, vacationing in Florida, decided to take up wrestling with her sister's boyfriend, Hunt said. Her grappling career shortlived, she wound up with a crushed sternum and some broken ribs.

Junior Pat Gopaul, tops on the team in the 440, may be out for the season with a bad achilles tendon. And senior co-captain Kat Taylor is still coming back from the nagging leg injury that kept her off the cross-country courses last fall.

Until then, however, the veteran coach will be depending on senior co-captain Sue Harper, who normally runs hurdles and the 400-meter relay, to leap into the jumping events.

Freshman wonderwoman Darlene Beckford, who holds school records in the half-mile, mile and two-mile events, will set the pace in the 1500-meter and mile runs.