I am a senior member of the Harvard Women’s Varsity Tennis team.  I have been a member of the varsity team since my freshman year. At Harvard, I am involved in several different activities including: The Harvard Lampoon, Student Athletic Advisory Committee, Drug Alcohol Peer Advising, and the Harvard Alumni Association Building Community Committee.  The manner in which leaders are selected for these various organizations differs, but they each have a very clear and consistent process that they follow.  In the athletic department at Harvard, the process by which an individual(s) is elected captain of an athletic team is supposed to be uniform across the 42 varsity sports; the athletic department puts out a clear policy, but while some teams follow these, others do not. 

Each of the three years that I have been on the tennis team the process for electing captain has been a bit different.  Though the outgoing captain of the team runs the election process for tennis, the involvement of the coaches and administrators is somewhat different; and the guidelines provided by the coaches and administrators has varied. 

I hope to find how Harvard’s athletics policy on team captain selection can be changed or improved so that it is consistently implemented across all varsity teams. My goal is to recommend a policy that reflects the best practices of team captain selections. It may be that Harvard’s policy is satisfactory and that it just isn’t implemented, or it may be that it isn’t implemented because there are flaws in the policy. I want to develop a policy and practice that will be adopted by the Harvard Department of Athletics, embraced by coaches, and implemented consistently by each sport in their captain selection.