Ivy League Sports

Silver Era, Golden Moments celebrates the first 25 years of formal championship athletic competition for women in the Ivy League, the nation’s oldest women’s collegiate conference. Starting with rowing in 1974, the Ivy League now sponsors championships in 16 women's sports. Ivy schools sponsor the most teams, offering opportunities to the most women, of any league in the country. We hope these are also the best women’s opportunities in the country: we certainly try to make them so!

Publication of this book is the capstone of a year-long celebration of this tradition and rededication to its ideals. Funded by the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, the Silver Anniversary year included a comprehensive photohistory exhibit that appeared at each Ivy institution, campus reunions and special events at each institution, and a League-wide closing symposium that brought together more than 300 enthusiastic participants, representing half a century of Ivy women’s athletics.

The Ivy League is proud to be unique within American collegiate athletics. Emphasizing both academic and athletic accomplishment, and without awarding athletic “grants-in-aid,” the Ivy League seeks both to fulfill its students’ athletic potential and to assure their full personal and academic integration into campus life. Taught by some of the finest coaches in the world, Ivy League women athletes excel and grow as complete individuals, and Silver Era is their “history of record”: from the initial Ivy champions to the most recent national champions, from the first women Rhodes Scholars to the first women’s ice hockey Olympic gold medalists.

All sports, at their best, speak a common language, uniting athletes across different times or places, in any league and at any competitive level. Sports remind us to strive toward our dreams, to lead each other on and to pick each other up … and to be sure to have fun while we do it! And so we hope that Silver Era is not only an Ivy League story but a universal one: of serious purpose, hard work, and dramatic accomplishment — of sweat and joy, pain and laughter, stretching muscles and stretching hopes — of many different women and men building opportunities together, for each other and for others to come.

Fittingly for institutions that are older than the nation they serve, Silver Era’s narrative also is an important American one, for the history of Ivy women’s athletics represents a quarter-century of enormous educational change throughout the country. The book’s first voices are those of women who competed at five Ivy universities for decades before the start of formal Ivy competition. They speak across the years to the countless girls and women who now have grasped the opportunities, athletic and otherwise, promised by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

In the 1970s, these pioneers were followed by women athletes and coaches, among a new generation of women students, faculty, and administrators, who transformed the eight primarily male Ivy institutions into schools that were far more open to women. The mixes of welcome and of opposition that they describe on the field and in the locker room mirrored the attitudes encountered in Ivy classrooms and laboratories, and reflected as well the experiences of millions of women whose unprecedented enrollment in American higher education transformed not only their institutions, but our society as well.

The younger voices of the 1980s and 1990s speak perhaps more in triumph and less of struggle than their predecessors. As have their peers across the country, they have sought to exploit to the fullest the academic, athletic, and personal opportunities they have inherited. But they also have understood their own obligation to expand and strengthen those opportunities for the women who will follow in a new century. And they too have contributed, from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the Olympic movement to communities all across America, to the Ivy tradition of national leadership that began in physical education at the turn of the 20th century and was exemplified in the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women in the 1970s.

One of the many coaches whose interviews I read during the development of Silver Era suggested that the essential and inimitable value of participating in sport is in accepting its risk. In no other college activity, in or out of the classroom, is the participant so unable to predict the outcome, and thus so forced to learn lessons apart from the action itself. Whether the athlete wins or loses, she must learn to find value not only in that result but — far more importantly — in the effort she put forth, in the dedication of her teammates and her support of them, and ultimately in her own growth. Silver Era shows, over and over again, how well Ivy League women’s athletics provides the opportunity for that growth — and how well Ivy women took advantage of it.

Literally thousands of names appear in this volume. Whether in compelling individual stories or in lists of national and international honors, they tell how women at eight different schools came together and flourished as a unified league, each school’s and each sport’s successes at once challenging and encouraging the others to be better. They speak for many thousands more women, and for the women and men who coached and supported them, who have created a heritage of personal excellence and team achievement, of unyielding service and of love for each other. The Ivy League proudly dedicates Silver Era, Golden Moments to all of them, and to the athletes and coaches who will follow in the future they have given us.

On behalf of the Ivy League, I offer profound thanks to Paula Welch, Lynn Whittaker, Dan Rosenthal, Donna Mugavero, Alyssa Theodore, Chuck Yrigoyen, and Carolyn Campbell-McGovern, whose care and craft brought forth a book from a dream.