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November-December 2006

• Seamus Heaney, Digging with the Pen

• Forum: The Ethanol Illusion
• Ouch!
• Vita: Zane Grey
• Hello, Geotech

• Cambridge 02138

• The Beauty Bounty
• Questing Eye
• Grading Teachers
• "Unsales" Pitches

• A Lesson with Liv
• The FOX News Channel News We Can Use
• Arriflex and Amber
• Off the Shelf
• Chapter & Verse
• Admissions Equity
• Big Sky Blues
• Grolier Reincarnated
• High Art

• Extracurriculars
• Edible Flora (& Fauna)
• Making It

• In this Issue
• Taking Teaching Seriously
• The Business of Teaching
• Yesterday's News
• Susanne Ebbinghaus
• Interim Agendas
• An Allston Metamorphosis?
• Adios, Early Admissions
• Money-Management Makeover
• Controversial Visitor
• Bigger Biology
• Brevia
• Sciences and Gender
• Open for Business
• Fleet Policy
• How to Handle Hills
• Skipper with a Stopwatch
• Challenges on the Field — and Off
• Soccer Summary

• "This Craving to Fly"
• Alumni College
• Well Done
• Job Notices

• Bell Swap

• Audience Response

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Sports
Skipper with a Stopwatch

Jason Saretsky, Harvard’s new head coach of cross country and track and field (he succeeds Frank Haggerty ’68, who retired in June), competed as a middle-distance runner, specializing in the 800-meter run, which many identify as the most painful event in track. It’s the event where “the sprinter meets the distance runner,” and the sustained intensity of effort induces a ferocious lactic-acid burn late in the race. But Saretsky knows both the trials and the joys of athletics; he laments the fact that “the only time you hear about track and field is when there is a drug accusation, and that’s a shame. There is a purity to our sport, a beauty to our sport, that is special.”

Jason Saretsky

Photograph by David Silverman / Harvard Sports Information

Saretsky began running in seventh grade, and at Columbia (he graduated in 1999), he ran on a 4 x 800 relay team that won the Heptagonal championship. He earned a master’s degree in exercise physiology from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and worked as a graduate assistant coach of the Lions’ track squad. In 2001 he moved to Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, where, as an assistant coach and later, associate head coach, he helped guide Iona teams to top-10 finishes at the NCAA cross-country championships four years running—no mean feat for an institution with only 3,000 students. Twice, Iona finished fourth in the NCAAs, allowing those teams to bring home the first NCAA trophies in the college’s athletic history.

Saretsky jumped at the opportunity to return to his roots in the Ivy League. “I’ve felt for a long time that Harvard is a sleeping giant,” he notes. “There’s incredible potential here: you have all the resources and facilities one could ask for. And there’s a great tradition: I think Harvard has produced more individual national champions in track and field than all the other Ivy colleges combined.”

 

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