She talks to her players about what she terms “performance weight,” the ideal weight that would help each woman do best on the court. But those conversations are minimal.

Senior women’s basketball player Brogan Berry says that on the rare occasions when she and her teammates have been weighed by the athletic department, the trainers do not even show them their weights.

“Female body image is always still a huge problem among athletes. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that we tend to keep it to ourselves,” Berry says. “I don’t know many female athletes who would be willing to put their weight on a public roster.”

LYING FOR THE LIST

The weight of almost every male athlete is listed on the Harvard athletic department’s website. If a player does not want to be listed, according to Svoboda, he can indicate his preference to be omitted from the roster altogether. He cannot be on the roster without listing his weight.

When Svoboda writes press releases for the Department of Athletics, he says, he commonly mentions male players’ weights alongside background information like their hometowns.

Just because these statistics are easily available and widely distributed, though, does not mean they are true.

“There are many people who list their weights in the program as 10 pounds above what their actual weights are,” says junior men’s lacrosse player Brad Cappellini. “As a guy and a competitor, you fear the bigger, stronger person more.”

He estimates that up to 75 percent of male players weigh less than the rosters say they do. “I know guys on my team do it. I mean, I’ve done it,” he says.

Svoboda acknowledges that the public height and weight chart might make some players squirm. “Whether you’re talking about males or females, there are people who are conscious of their body types,” he says.

But in men, this anxiety more often springs from concern that their bodies are not perfectly suited to athletic performance than that they don’t look good enough.

“A guy feels secure, has a stronger sense of self, when he sees next to his name a weight that...makes him successful at his sport,” Cappellini says.

For Cappellini, the fact that women’s weights are not listed indicates that women do not derive pride in their weights for the same reason men do. “Society,” he says about women, “doesn’t make them change their body weight to affect their sport. It makes them want to adapt to a social standard.”

Sophomore women’s rugby player Brandy Machado says, “There seems to be pressure to be very small, and I think that’s less about performance and more just about social pressures for women.”

James Frazier, the director of strength and conditioning for the Department of Athletics, says he has met far more women who come in to training sessions talking about a goal weight that they aim to achieve—nearly always under their current weight, not over it. But he knows that plenty of men fib to increase their weights for the public listing.