Booters Head West For NCAA Showdown

When the Harvard men's soccer team boards its flight for Los Angeles this morning. If'll mark the beginning of the most important weekend in a decade for the Crimson squad.

Harvard will meet UCIA for the first-time ever at 1 p.m. (PST) Sunday in the quarterfinals of the 1984 NCAA Division I championship tournament.

The largest on campus crowd ever to see a UCLA soccer, match is expected when the Cantabs will attempt to master an-upset of the nation's second-seeded Bruin squad that would set up the Crimson's first Final Four trip since 1971.

The other six quarterfinalists will also meet Sunday at sites across the country. Top-ranked Indians will host St. Louis, third ranked Virginia will meet Clemson, and fourth-ranked Fairleigh Dickinson will meet Hartwick.

But none of the other meetings seems as intriguing as Sunday's scheduled showdown in 1. A. before an anticipated gathering of 3500. Each squad enters on the heels of its first regional championship win in more than 10 years but with little knowledge of the other.

The Crimson side heads west sporting a 12-4 mark and riding four straight shutout victories--including last weekend's 1-0 double-overtime upset of the University of Connecticut that gave Harvard its first New England championship since 1972.

The prospect of a New England title might have seemed remote after the Crimson opened its season with a 1-3 record, but cohesion, confidence and including have sparked the squad to 11 victories in its last 12 games, including seven sputouts along the way.

UCLA, meanwhile, garnered the Western Regional crown with a 1-0 victory last weekend over the University of San Francisco. The 18-2-2 Bruins, who have played at home just six times all year, allowed just one shot on goal in the contest's second half.

Since the Crimson and Bruins have never met, both teams have had to rely on hearsay and scouting reports in order to prepare for the impending confrontation.

"It's really been hard to prepare for this," says Crimson Coach Jape Shattuck. "It's like the experiment the law professor did when he simulated an assassination. When he asked a number of people what they saw, he got a number of different stories. I talked to three coaches whose teams had played against UCLA and I got three different stories."

The stories all had one thing in common, though--each mentioned the strength of the Bruin offense. Led by midfielder Dale Ervine, who scored 10 goals and set up 13 more. UCLA has outscored its opponents, 62-24, this season and almost doubled its opponents in shots on goal, 451-230.

"They'll be our best opponent this year," observes Shattuck. "They don't have any really obvious weaknesses. In that sense, they are a balanced team."

So the Crimson defense, which hasn't given up a goal in over 459 minutes, will get its biggest challenge of the season. "They're going to be stretched to the limits. They've gone up against similarly gifted players, but not so many at once," Shattuck says.

But UCLA coach Sigi Schmid, whose team is all-Californian save one player from Washington state, has also heard many things about the Harvard booters.

"From all we've heard about Harvard, they're an excellent soccer team. We think our brand of play is very similar to Harvard's," says the Bruin mentor, who was a member of UCLA's national runner-up squads in 1972 and 1973.

Both teams prefer to build attacks and counterattacks from defense or midfield, utilizing short passes rather than long, lower-percentage passes into the opposing team's defensive zone. Both sides, however, are capable of scoring from the air as well as the ground.

As a result, if the Crimson plans on progressing to the semis, it will need to neutralize the offense Soccer Digest called "the nation's most powerful" and rely on its own strong attack to put the ball in the net.

And Shattuck believes his team has a chance.

Says the Crimson coach, "I think this will turn out to be a very evenly matched game."