Facilities

Harvard has a lot of athletic facilities. Some are good, some are not so good. Almost all are pretty old.

Harvard Stadium is the colossus of the University's athletic facilities. Built around the turn of the century, the Stadium has a capacity of around 40,000.

The Stadium has some historical significance in that it is the oldest concrete-supported stadium in America. At one time a bowl, it was reduced to its present horseshoe shape in the 1930s. Temporary stands are moved into the open end of the Stadium for the Dartmouth and Yale games.

Harvard Stadium is a fine place to watch a football game. Sight lines are excellent, considered to be among the best in the country, and there's barely a bad seat in the house.

The only drawback to the Stadium are the hard, cold, backless concrete seats which can be a real pain in the ass in November.

Watson Rink is the only ice skating facility in the University. Though Watson is relatively old as hockey arenas go, it has one of the hardest and best ice surfaces in the East. Small (seating capacity is only 1900) even by college standards, Watson is a cozy, noisy, and enjoyable place to watch hockey, so long as you can stand the freezing temperatures inside the arena. Watson is reputed to be the second coldest rink in the East, next to Vermont's.

The big problem with Watson is that, being the only ice skating rink in the University, its use by undergraduates is limited. The Harvard teams, intramurals leagues, graduate schools, and local high schools, all skate at Watson, resulting in little accessibility for the general student body, and only then at inconvenient hours.

The Indoor Athletic Building is the busiest indoor facility at Harvard, but, sad to say, it also is so antiquated that it needs to be replaced more desperately than any facility in the University.

The main gym looks like something out of a small Midwestern high school, with one official size basketball court and two smaller adjacent ones. The stands are of the fold-down variety and hold about 1000.

The swimming pool is also poor, so bad that two years ago the Penn divers refused to compete because they considered the pool too shallow for safety.

A bunch of minor sports are played in the IAB--wrestling, fencing, and volleyball among them.

But the IAB's greatest use comes from undergraduate intramural and general activity. Many of the individual athletic programs are conducted there, such as karate, weightlifting, and scuba diving lessons.

The basketball courts are always open, but they are so popular and so few in number that they're obsolete for a college Harvard's size.

Harvard had at one time the best track facility in New England--the Bubble, a structure supported by air. But when an air blower blew out two years ago, the Bubble collapsed, and Harvard had to resort back to Briggs Cage. Briggs is probably the worst indoor college track in the East if not the universe, and the less said about it the better. A personal inspection should suffice.