2000-Present

2000 Princeton named John Thompson, a 1988 graduate, as its head men's basketball coach. With his hiring, all eight Ivy League schools have now had an African-American head coach of men's basketball. Thompson of Washington, D.C. led his Tigers to the Ivy title and the NCAA Tournament in his first season.

2000 It would be hard to imagine the Taylor twins having a better year than this. Brenda, competing for Harvard, and Lindsay, competing for Brown, combined to win eight individual events at the 2000 Indoor and Outdoor League Championships and both were named Academic All-Ivy! Brenda would win a national title in the 400m hurdles the following year and qualify for the World Championships while Lindsay would claim her fourth straight Indoor Pentathlon title.

2001 Princeton's Ilvy Friebe, of Bonn, Germany, became the first African-American to be named the Ivy League Field Hockey Player of the Year as she amassed 37 points in seven League contests, nearly three times as many as anyone else! Friebe would win Player of the Year honors in 2002 as well and set the League record for points scored in a career (Ivy games only) with 83 (34 goals, 15 assists). Friebe also became just the second Ivy Leaguer to be named first-team All-America twice.

2001 Two Ivy League African-American football players - Princeton's Cameron Atkinson and Yale's Billy Brown - are named second-team Academic All-America by Verizon. With those selections, the number of times a black Ivy League footballer has been named Academic All-America has risen to ten. Brown is the first black Yale athlete to be named Academic All-American in any sport.

2001 Junior wide receiver Carl Morris led the Harvard Crimson to its first perfect season on the gridiron in 88 years. Morris, who entered his senior season with nearly every Harvard receiving record, was named the League's recipient of the Asa S. Bushnell Cup as the Most Valuable Player in the Ivies. As a senior in 2002, he was a candidate for the Walter Payton Award, the highest honor in Division I-AA football, and became the first two-time recipient of the Bushnell Cup in a quarter-century.

2002 Yale senior Thomas Hocker earned academic honors in addition to his success on the track. A recipient of the William Neely Mallory Award, the most prestigious athletic award given to a senior male at Yale, Hocker was awarded the prestigious Churchill Scholarship, an annual award given to 11 American students by the Churchill Foundation in Britain. He was also named as a first-team Academic All-American by the College Sports Information Directors of America.

2002 There were some remarkable efforts at the Outdoor Heps Championships in Annapolis as Princeton's amazing high jumper Tora Harris, who won NCAA titles both indoor and outdoor, cleared an all-time League-best 7-foot-7. But the Men's Outstanding Performer was Chris Lambert, Harvard's junior sprinter. Lambert won both the 100m and 200m dashes and both times would have set Heps records, except that each was deemed wind-aided. Wind-aided marks are not eligible for record purposes. His 10.19 clocking in the 100m dash was nearly a half-second faster than his nearest competitor. Another great performance came from the Penn senior Tuan Wreh, who was a double winner in the long and triple jumps. His triple jump victory was his sixth straight Heps triple title and broke a 25-year-old Heps record as he covered 53-foot-5.

2002 The 1999 Ivy Player of the Year, James Blake of Harvard, won his first ever ATP tour title at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington, D.C., over the summer. Blake is also a member of the United States Davis Cup team.

2002 Penn junior forward Ugonna Onyekwe was named the Player of the Year in the greatest season of Ivy men’s basketball ever. For the first time ever, the League sent three teams to postseason tournaments following an unprecedented three-way playoff for the NCAA berth. Two other African-Americans joined Onyekwe on the Ivy first-team, his junior teammate Koko Archibong and Brown junior Earl Hunt. Onyekwe would earn Player of the Year honors in his senior season, as well, becameing just the second player to win the award outright twice, joining Princeton's Kit Mueller (1990, 1991). He led Penn to the NCAA Tournament and scored 30 points against Oklahoma State in the first round. Afterward, Cowboy Coach Eddie Sutton couldn’t find enough praise for Onyekwe, who graduated with 1,762 career points, ninth all-time in the Ivy League.

2002 Harvard wide receiver Carl Morris became the first player in 25 years to repeat as the recipient of the Asa S. Bushnell Cup as the Most Valuable Player in Ivy Football.

2002 Fencer Erinn Smart, a recent Columbia graduate, was the 2002 U.S. National Champion in the women's foil and the 2002 Div. I National Championships bronze medalist. Smart was also a 2001 U.S. Senior Worlds bronze medalist, a 2000 Div. I National Championships silver medalist, and a member of the 2001, 1999, 1998 World Senior Team.

2003 Cory Gibbs was added to the U.S. national team's January men's soccer roster. Gibbs is among the finest athletes in Ivy history. As a senior in 2000, he led the Bears to the Ivy Men's Soccer title and then to the Elite Eight of the NCAA College Cup as the League's Player of the Year and First-Team All-American. In addition to being a three-time All-Ivy performer, Cory also was a higher achiever in the classroom and was a member of the Academic All-Ivy Team. A native of Plantation, Fla., Gibbs is now playing at the highest level of professional soccer in Germany's Bundesliga. In the fall of 2001, the then-21-year-old Gibbs became the youngest American ever to score a goal in the German First Division.

2003 Brown basketballer Earl Hunt of Rockville, Md., became just the fourth Ivy Leaguer to amass 2,000 career points in leading the Bears to their first National Invitation Tournament. Hunt broke Arnie Berman's 31-year-old school career scoring record as a junior in 2002.

2003 Yale freshman Joslyn Woodard  shook up the Heps Indoor Championships by winning three events -- the 60-and 200-meter dashes and the long jump -- and being named the 2003 Performer of the Meet. In both events she knocked off Cornell’s Katy Jay, the defending champion in each. In the 60, Woodard set a new meet record of 7.59 seconds, besting the old mark of 7.62 seconds, set only in 2002 by Jay.

2003 Columbia University named Joe Jones as its new basketball coach, replacing Armond Hill. Jones’ brother, James, is the head coach at Yale, making them the first African-American brothers to be head coaches in the same Division I conference at the same time. In fact, it marked the first time since 1957 that any conference had brothers as head coaches (Clarence and Hank Iba in the Missouri Valley Conference).

2003 Harvard sprint standout Chris Lambert found a new title -- that of World Champion. Lambert, running for the British squad at the World University Games in Daegu, South Korea, took the Gold medal in the 100-meter dash, posting a time of 10.44. At the NCAA Championships in June, Lambert had the best 200-meter times in both the preliminaries (20.71) and semifinals (20.73) before finishing fourth in the final in a time of 20.64.

2003 Princeton lacrosse standout Damien Davis, a unanimous All-Ivy selection, earned first-team All-America status for the first time. As a junior in 2002, Davis was a USILA Second-Team All-American as the Tigers wound up in the NCAA Lacrosse Championship. Davis captured a National Championship and four Ivy League titles while marking the opponent’s best attackmen in every game of his career. The 12th pick of the Major League Lacrosse draft, Davis was a member of the Champion Baltimore Bayhawks in his initial pro season.

2003 Sports Illustrated named its 101 Most Influential Minorities in Sports and 12 of the selections had Ivy League backgrounds. Among them were three former Ivy basketball players (Kery Davis of Dartmouth & HBO; Steve Mills of Princeton & MSG; and Craig Littlepage of Penn & UVa) and two Dartmouth footballers (Jimmie Lee Solomon of MLB and Reggie Williams of Disney). The others had attended an Ivy school, either as an undergraduate or graduate student, including Robert Johnson (Princeton), Jonathan Mariner (Harvard), Anita DeFrantz (Penn), Terdema Ussery (Princeton), Ray Anderson (Harvard), Pamela Wheeler (Dartmouth) and Peter Bynoe (Harvard). Later in the summer, Black Enterprise Magazine featured both Mills and Ussery on the cover its magazine and asked which would be the next commissioner of the NBA.

2003 Former Penn baseball standout Doug Glanville hits a game-winning triple in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series as his Cubs finish just five outs from advancing to the World Series. Glanville would have been the first African-American Ivy Leaguer to appear in the Series.

2003 Brown soccer standout Adom Crew closed his career as Ivy Player of the Year, first-team All-America and third-team Academic All-America as his Bears won the Ivy League title for the third time in his career. Crew was also drafted in the fifth round of the Major League Superdraft by the Colombus Crew.

2003 Harvard running back Clifton Dawson, of Scarborough, Ontario, becomes the first freshman to earn first-team All-Ivy status as a running back. He do so after becoming the first Ivy freshman to ever rush for more than 1,000 yards in a season. He ended the year with 1,187 yards and ranked 10th nationally at 131.9 yards per game.