Sport: Morale Builder

Even when he is looking for sprinters and distance runners, Coach Edward Hurt of Baltimore's Morgan State College tries all his new prospects first at a quarter-mile. "Then we branch out from there," he says. This season, without branching too far, the Hurt system had turned up four of the most formidable quarter-milers in the business. Last week, in the climax of the Penn Relays, there was no catching them.

Tearing through the first two quarters of their specialty, the mile relay, Morgan State's No. 1 and No. 2 men piled up a six-yard lead by the halfway mark. Fifty seconds later, with the 35,000 track fans in Philadelphia's Franklin Field in an uproar, New York University had cut the lead to a stride. For N.Y.U. that left matters up to Anchor Man Reggie Pearman, who had never been beaten in three years of running in the Penn Relays. He jetted off after Morgan State's anchor man, tall, long-legged Jamaican George Rhoden, 400-meter champion of the A.A.U. But Pearman was never able to close that stride, and little Morgan State (enrollment 1,500) finally had a big-time winner. The time: 3:13.6, more than a full second faster than the Penn Relay record.

Morgan State's academic history goes back to 1867, when Methodist clergymen founded it as a school for Negroes. Its track history began when Coach Hurt was appointed athletic director in 1929. In those days Morgan had no track to run on, and Morgan's youngsters practiced on a gravel road that circled the campus. But as time passed, Morgan got itself a first-class, WPA-built running track, and Morgan athletes began to win their share of the meets with other Negro colleges in their own circuit.

Three years ago, a Morgan relay team was good enough to get an invitation to the "B" division (small fry) of the Penn Relays. Morgan won. Last year, Morgan enrolled 23-year-old George Rhoden, who had competed for Jamaica in the London Olympics. With Rhoden and his mile-mates Bill Brown, 22, Sam LaBeach, 24, and Bob Tyler, 26, Morgan had been the experts' choice in the Penn Relays' big event.

Said Morgan President Martin D. Jenkins last week: "The effect of winning teams on the entire student body's morale, particularly in a segregated college, is a factor worth considering." At week's end, morale at Morgan was fine.