Ivy League Sports

What a special day this is, isn’t it? I look out here and it really warms my heart in a number of ways. But as I said to you this morning, when we talked a little bit about the history of women in sport and the Ivy League, and as you might suspect from listening to those historical presentations, you’ll realize that many of us who helped to pioneer what we are here to celebrate today didn’t see this many women on campus let alone joining a celebration of women in sport. For those of us this truly is a very special occasion.

Some of you, I would suspect quite a number of you in this room, were not even born when that journey began. That’s very humbling to some of us. But it is you who need to be the leadership, and need to provide the leadership in the months and years ahead, to ensure that the efforts of the past twenty-five years will be preserved and will be built upon so that your daughters, and my beloved granddaughters, will have every opportunity to stretch and grow in whatever areas they choose to achieve and pursue excellence in.

I’ve been asked hundreds of times how I would describe the progress, the rewards and the journey of the past twenty-five years, a journey that for many of us was singularly defined by a committed effort to seek the acquisition of gender equity on the playing fields of America. For me that is a very easy question to answer, because unequivocally the greatest reward has been beyond the world of sports participation. The greatest reward of the last twenty-five years has been the social, political and economic changes that have elevated and validated women in sport and in virtually every other facet of life.

These are best summed perhaps in the title that I have selected for my soon to be written book; I am going to call that book “I was Called a Tomboy, My Daughters are Called Athletes”. There’s a world of difference between those appellations, particularly if you wear one or the other. I have always believed that the deepest kind of passion is that which is born of deprivation, inequity or injustice, because it mourns the loss of unfulfilled potential, and it also kindles the flame of commitment to provide opportunities for others to commit and achieve and find their own promise. And it is that passion, that level of passion, that drove so many of us thirty years ago, and it is also that passion that fills so many of us with feelings of celebration as we approach the year 2000.

Ours is a culture very rich in sports tradition and sports heritage. Poets, historians and leaders alike have extolled the virtues of the athletics experience. Volumes have been written to translate the greater reward of being a participant in competitive sport. And, I think more often than not the first real hero in the Twentieth Century American child’s life had come from the world of sport. Yet for too long the lessons learned, the experience gained, and the dreams spun from sport were virtually denied to half of our citizens.

When I was a child, sports were a very natural part of life in my family. I had a grandmother who had been a basketball player back in the early 1900s. I had an aunt and uncle who were members of the United States Olympic gymnastics team in 1936, and I had a father who had played basketball and run track who taught me to swim and run and bat a ball before I ever entered school. And then just about the time that my love of playing sport became deeply entrenched and my skill potential began to emerge, the harsh social reality of being a girl loomed very large, and life became a series of mixed messages. During the week — and I want you to hear this — I was THE best pitcher and batter on our neighborhood baseball team, unequivocally! But on weekends all I could do was sit and cheer on the sidelines at Little League games. I remember very happily saving and spending my allowance to buy a used pair of shoulder pads from the boy up the street for my favorite fall sport that I played, and my mother countered by taking me on a shopping spree to buy me a whole new wardrobe of skirts and frilly blouses.

The internal struggles began, the passion was born and ultimately my life’s work was determined. I became an athlete, a coach, an athletics administrator and a very strong advocate of giving girls a sporting chance. Years of work by legions of women and men committed to providing their daughters with the same opportunities afforded their sons has reaped rewards worthy of celebration. Just think about it, now little girls can have heroes too. Now girls and women can experience the joy of teamwork and the challenge of competition and the exhilaration that comes with the synchronizing of mind, body and spirit, and any of you in this room who have undertaken that understand exactly what I mean.

Women have more opportunity now to be whatever they want to be, to pursue whatever they want to pursue, and to maximize their human potential, than at any other time in our history. But while tremendous progress has been made, we all know that we enter the new millennium with an uncompleted agenda in this arena. We have not yet achieved full gender equity on the playing fields of America, not in terms of participation in sport and support, not in terms of coaching opportunities, and not in terms of administrative and top leadership positions. The fact that in 1995 I was one of only two female athletic directors in the country in a Division IA school with football is poignant recognition of the truth of that reality.

Even the Ivy League, with its long and proud tradition and its eminently sane and responsible philosophy, has not deigned to appoint a woman as director of athletics at any of its institutions. Gender bias is not as always as overt as it was twenty-five years ago, but it is just as onerous. Inculcating change is not easy, but if we have managed to move from where were twenty-five years ago to where we are today then I assure you no mountain is too high. Those of you are under the age of 35-40 have not experienced the same deprivation of opportunity that those of us over the age of 40 have experienced. Thank heavens. However, it is important for you to know about and understand what mountains have been climbed on your behalf so that you can remain both vigilant and resolute, now and in the future. Because only if each of you in this room will continue to give back, and give back again, can this journey ever reach its final destination.

It has long been said that sport represents a microcosm of the world at large. If that is true then the birth of the emergence of women’s athletics in the Ivy League occurred at a perfect time because it was born during the confluence of four major events in the early 1970s: the birth of the women’s movement, the birth of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women or AIAW, the enactment of Title IX, and as President Rodin pointed out this morning, Billie Jean King’s somewhat ignominious defeat of Bobby Riggs in a highly hyped gender provocative tennis match. Those four events had a tremendous impact upon addressing the agenda of increasing opportunity for girls and women in sport. We moved into an age of increased awareness and heightened sensitivity, but we still had miles to go before we could achieve any kind of real acceptance or support. It was an exciting time and a rewarding time but it was not always an easy time. The sheer growth and development of creating opportunities for women in and of itself was a gargantuan challenge, particularly with extremely limited resources.

Accompanying that was the additional challenge of trying to create an environment of harmony and co-existence during a period of enormous social change that was ill understood and not enormously attractive to a lot of men in athletics, and that’s a very polite way of stating the case.

Actually we women in the Ivy League were far more fortunate than many of our colleagues in other places because of the underlying Ivy League philosophy that’s predicated upon basic human civility and respect for individual opinions. I was afforded wonderful help and support from the top, from the president, from the director of athletics, from other high level officials across the campus as well as from those in the league office. But life in the trenches was not always easy for us women in those early years. We were often very isolated, one woman per campus, and none of us was the athletic director. And, we had no women to mentor us on our journey into uncharted territory, we simply had to figure it out by the seat of our warm-up pants. Some days we figured it out very well and some days those pants got pretty dirty. But we took very seriously our responsibility to the young women on our campuses.

I’m going to invite you to jump into my sneakers with me for a few minutes and travel back to revisit those early years for just a few minutes. I apologize that these four quick vignettes are all Princeton based stories, but that was my personal experience. I suspect, however, that they represent variations on a theme similarly experienced at all Ivy League schools. In retrospect, some of the stories are really quite humorous. I would only say that they were less so at the time they were experienced.

Got your shoes tied? Here we go …

I remember going to the University book store and buying shirts that said “Princeton” on the front of them, and then standing in my living room ironing names on the back of them the day before sending the women’s tennis team off to a match. I remember writing the results of the competition myself and then hand delivering it to the local newspaper, hoping against hope that they would see fit to print it.

I remember taking my women’s field hockey team to another college in another state, which will remain unnamed for obvious reasons. After the game they went into the locker room to shower while I went in to visit with our host coach, so that they we could get dressed into nice clothing and stop for a nice dinner on the way back to Princeton. Our manager came into the office in a few minutes and said “Miss Dean, we can’t find the towels.” So I turned to our host coach and I said “Can you please tell us where the towels are,” and I watched the red creep up in her face and she said, “Oh, we don’t provide towels for our girls.” And I had 22 women on my team who had to pat themselves dry with paper towels before they could get dressed and make the drive back to Princeton.

I remember our women’s swimming team qualifying for the AIAW National Championships to be held in Moscow, Idaho. Five swimmers and a diver all qualified for this championship, although in the end only the swimmers were able to go because our diver, CeCe Herron, had been tapped to represent the United States in an international diving competition that weekend.

Ironically it meant that CeCe was competing in Moscow, Russia while her teammates were competing in Moscow, Idaho. Anyway, there was a rule at the time that women’s teams had to be accompanied by a female chaperon which in most cases was the coach. But we happened to have a male coach and we didn’t have the money to send two people with the team, so the coach had to stay home while I had to go chaperon the team. Now just think about for a minute, that is bizarre! As a matter of fact, I also had to serve as the chaperon for two swimmers for Rutgers University that weekend who were also sent with us, and, that’s right, Yale also joined us. There were eighty teams at that AIAW championship, and that small team of Princeton women swimmers captured third place in the team trophy. The money that we spent calling Coach Bill Farley back in Princeton before and after every race probably would have paid for his plane tickets to be there in the first place.

And I remember going to the renowned men’s crew coach at Princeton to ask for his help because a group of women wanted to start a women’s rowing team. And having him look me right in the eye with his arms folded across his chest and say to me “there will be women in this boat house over my dead body”. Now I want you to remember, I was twenty-six years old at the time. It took every ounce of courage in my body to stop my knees from shaking long enough to respond to him quietly, “Pete, I didn’t come to ask for your permission, I came to ask for your help”. I remember starting the program without his help, buying used equipment from a nearby prep school, hiring a coach and going out in the launch with him and the team at six o’clock in the morning, which was the only time the women were allowed to row on the lake. I remember them coming in third in the national championship that first year, and then being allowed to row at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. I remember them winning the national championship the second year, and then being given space in the boat house and some new equipment. And, I remember standing on the banks of a river in Montreal, Canada two years later and watching two women from that team win Olympic Bronze Medals as members of the United States Rowing Team, and I wept.

All four of those vignettes represent the kinds of experiences that create passion and provide the strength and the courage to generate change, and those kinds of experiences that become part of the fabric of who you are. Tenacity, perseverance and the demand for accountability constitute one kind of giving back. It costs nothing but personal commitment, courage and caring. No matter what the quality of your experience was as an Ivy League student-athlete, this level of giving back is the absolute minimum to which each of you should commit — on behalf of the people you care about, the teams that you care about, and the institution that you care about.

Has the world of women’s athletics changed a lot in the past twenty-five years? Yes it has, in a whole lot of positive ways. Is the arena more user friendly for women, and more supportive of women? Yes, tons. Tons better than it was. Have we finally met the challenge of eradicating gender bias with regard to competitive athletics? No, not by a long shot. I want you to walk with me before you take those sneakers off through one more quick scenic stop.

These women student-athletes were weary, and then angry, about the disparate treatment they received as compared to their brother student-athletes at a major Division I university and they decided to use the federal law known as Title IX to seek redress and attempt to end the discrimination. Among the things proven at the trial were the following: the male athletic director refused to allow the highly ranked women’s volleyball team to attend a prestigious tournament in Hawaii, even though the majority of the expenses were to have been paid by the host Hawaiians. Then the AD reprimanded the coach for not telling the team that it was the coach’s idea rather than the AD’s idea that they turn down the prestigious invitation. One year later, the athletic director authorized the men’s unranked basketball team to travel to Hawaii for a preseason tournament, with the University paying all of its expenses. One male alumnus testified that the AD made inappropriate remarks to women student-athletes in his presence, calling them “honey” and “sweetie”, and that the AD had said to this alumnus that he preferred women’s soccer to women’s softball because it was a more feminine sport, and the soccer players looked cute in their shorts.

The judge discovered that this athletic director had led a movement among a few of the nation’s colleges and universities to resist proposed changes for gender equity in athletics. As you might suspect, the courts severely criticized the university in its decision, calling its view of women archaic, and its approach to women’s athletics programs outmoded and ignorant, and gave the university twenty days to put a plan in place to rectify the situation. What was the university’s response? To appeal the court decision. And the athletic director received a 7% bonus pay for his job performance that year. And what was that year? 1996.

This true story serves as a timely reminder of how complex the achievement of gender equity in sport really is and how much more work we all have to undertake to ensure its acquisition. And lest you think that the university in this story is an anomaly, understand that in the past five years, twenty other such cases have been adjudicated in favor of the plaintiffs, collegiate women student athletes, and another fifty cases are currently somewhere in process in the judicial system. As you know, the Brown University case has become a hallmark case in the annals of sports law, and will remain so. I have said innumerable times that if all the money spent on fighting Title IX were instead applied or spent on achieving compliance with Title IX, we wouldn’t have any gender equity problems today.

Does the Ivy League matter? You bet your boots it does. Even back in the early days there was widespread recognition of the work being done in Ivy League Institutions. Many of the women administrators in the League were tapped for leadership positions at the regional and national level. And our women student-athletes, operating under the well articulated philosophy of the League, enjoyed high levels of competitive success, not only within the league but within larger regional and national borders.

While most institutions in the League don’t have the athletics resource base of large Division I universities, the league has made sure as a collective that women student-athletes are not disadvantaged at a level illustrated in the story that I just reiterated. Is the League perfect?

No, of course it’s not. Its challenges have been well articulated and documented and each of you need to become active partners in helping to overcome those challenges. And I mean active partners not just stand on the sideline critics. What impact will your involvement have on others?

You will be amazed, stunningly amazed. I had people telling me I was their role model before I had even had time to find one for myself, and it scared the heck out of me. But that’s how hungry women were in the 1970s to enter brave new worlds and to expand their own experiential horizons, and to look to other women to help them forge their paths. Those of us who were unwittingly thrust into that role were no more than a baby step ahead, we were more unsure than sure at times, on many fronts. And yet we realized that we had to accept the awesome responsibility of that role whether we were ready or not, and mentoring became a mantra, a mantra that many of us have been unable to shed even today.

I need to look no further than my own three daughters to understand the impact of seeing gender role models in one’s life. At the same time I was helping to give birth to women’s athletics as we know it today, I was also raising those three daughters at home, and struggling as so many other women do to figure out how to balance all those things in my life, how to do justice to the so many different roles, all of which were very important to me. I chose to do that by including my children in my work as much as possible so I often had them in tow — it was kind of a before its time version of ‘take your daughter to work’. It was not easy to make that decision at that time, because that’s not how things were done, but that what was we did for our family. What I didn’t realize until many years later was what an extraordinarily positive impact those experiences had on three growing girls. The youngest is about to graduate from college in two weeks, and her older sisters are both married and mothers themselves. We have often talked about the impact and influence of “our” life in sports. And if I ever had any doubts about whether my decisions were good or bad for them, and I had many as all parents do, particularly when they choose to break from the traditional way of doing things, I need only to listen to the girls today to know that the way we did it was good for them. So don’t ever sell short the impact and influence that you can have

on young girls and young women, and don’t ever, ever, forget your responsibility as a woman to provide those things for others. The Ivy philosophy has been very carefully crafted and nurtured with pride. Even seventeen years ago when my twelve year tenure at Princeton ended, it was understood in the league that gender equity is not only a legal mandate, but more importantly a moral imperative. That moral imperative cannot be achieved without the concrete support of everyone who believes in it and cares about it. One of the areas in which women in sport have been slow to grow is in realizing the importance of their professional and personal contributions, particularly of a financial nature, to make sure that the dream grows to fruition. There has been a tendency to demand change but a failure to support that change in real measure. We need to nurture ourselves and each other to understand that that is what needs to happen. Financial support for men’s athletic programs and teams has been traditionally strong for years. That same thing needs to happen on behalf of women’s programs and teams, and it needs to begin with the beneficiaries of those programs.

Fundamental to the success of women in sport in the Ivy League has been presidential support and leadership. Had that leadership not been in place twenty-five years ago and continued right through today we women would never have been able to climb out of the trenches, or perhaps to even have survived the trenches. But university presidents cannot do it alone, they cannot achieve the dream or fulfill the commitment alone. As Hillary Clinton has said, “it takes a village.” You are part of the Ivy League village, every one of you in this room. You care about it, you are a product of it, you believe in it, and you need to offer your resources to help sustain it, nurture it and to hold it accountable, and that is what will truly validate this 25th year celebration. You are a singularly elite group of women because you have received the extraordinary advantage of an Ivy League education, and because you have been blessed with the opportunity to experience being an athlete. The benefits derived from both of those opportunities are incalculable, and now you need to give back to ensure that others can be similarly advantaged and served even better.

As we grow older there is a natural tendency to reflect upon those things which have greatly influenced our lives, not only in gratitude but also in light of wanting to try to figure it out in order to help those who come after us to understand, so that their own lives will be enhanced and they can go on to achieve their own contributions to society. It’s a very natural thing. God, family and country continue to rank as the top three influences in my life, but right after them on the influence and impact scale are the people I have met and the experiences I have enjoyed in the world of sports. I have seen the best of it and the worst of it and I wouldn’t trade any of it. Well, not most of it. I have been truly blessed in my lifetime in the arenas of the sports world and rewarded far beyond the medals and the awards and the accolades. I think it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “the real reward of a thing well done is simply to have done it,” and that is so true. As you give back, as you find your own special way to make the place better than when you left it, you will reap rewards far beyond your wildest kent.

And so I conclude my message to you this afternoon by slightly altering the words of one of my all time favorite songs, one which was richly recorded by Whitney Houston. And I ask that you think about these words and reflect back on how you personally, each of you, might translate them into a way to give back to the places, the programs, and the people that have given you so much.

I wish each and every one of you just one moment in time, when you’re more than you thought you could be, when all of your dreams are a heart beat away and the answers are all up to thee.

I wish you one moment in time, when you’re racing with your own destiny.

Because then in that one moment in time, you will see you will be truly free.

God bless and thank you for inviting me to share this very special day in celebration of the 25th Anniversary.