Ivy League Sports

In January 1982 Columbia University announced that it would begin to admit women undergraduates to Columbia College in the fall of 1983. Barnard athletic director Margie Greenberg Tversky knew that this decision would greatly impact how women’s athletics would operate at the two schools, and spent the following year working with officials from Barnard and Columbia to formulate a plan that would provide the new female students at Columbia with established teams, as well as give Barnard student-athletes the opportunity to compete at a higher level with increased resources and support. Thus launched the Columbia/Barnard Consortium.

At the start of the decade Barnard teams competed at the Division III level and had several memorable achievements. Ylonka Wills, for example, was a walk-on runner as a freshman and had never run competitively before entering college. Yet Wills became a standout on the 1982 cross country team, winning the Seven Sisters Invitational Cross Country meet and the EAIAW championship, in which she established a new course record. When Wills finished fourth at that fall’s AIAW national championships, she earned All-America status — the first track and field athlete to do so in school history. In 1983-84, just after the Consortium was formed, the cross country and track and field programs began Division I competition. Carrie Daly captured the post-Consortium era’s first Ivy League victory in track and field when she won the javelin throw at the 1984 Outdoor Heptagonal Games, successfully defending the title she had won in 1983 wearing a Barnard uniform.

Barnard’s success in Division III competition set the stage for the transition to Division I and full participation in Ivy League play. In basketball, for example, success accelerated under the Consortium, with noteworthy play from both Barnard and Columbia students. Barnard’s Ula Lysniak, playing basketball from 1983 to 1987, became the first Columbia player to score 1,000 career points. By the end of her final season, she had expanded that total to a school record of 1,447, one of her 11 Columbia records, and had started every one of the 98 games played during her career. She still holds the school record for rebounding (764) as well as for scoring. Named a Fulbright Scholar, Lysniak became the first Columbia woman to play professional basketball, in Austria. She later returned to be an assistant coach in the Consortium while working toward a doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College. Ellen Bossert, who transferred to Columbia College from Barnard in 1985 as a junior, scored 1,068 points and collected 690 rebounds in those two years alone. She still holds Columbia’s school record for most points scored in a game at 39, as well as the number two and three spots, at 38 and 33 points. In her senior year the team played in the New York State NCAA Division III championship and earned an NCAA national at-large bid, its first.

There would be challenges in the transition from Division III to Division I as well. Coach Mary Curtis of the 1982 volleyball team, for example, commented that her group “had less experience than most high school teams. It is not that we don’t have enough new talent each year, but that we don’t have enough carry-over from year to year.” With better recruitment in the future, as the Consortium was implemented and resource levels increased, that problem would be alleviated. In the March 12, 1984, issue of the newsletter of the Varsity “C” Club, Margie Tversky reported that “this year, we’ve been able to send coaches on the road recruiting. Barnard Admissions is now very receptive to our input; they realize athletic recruiting can generate applications to the college. Some of our coaches have learned a great deal from the Columbia coaches.”

Facilities also posed difficulties, for while Columbia hosted the swimming and fencing teams, all other sports were practiced and played at Barnard in the pre-Consortium era. With increased demands on Barnard’s gymnasium, the women’s basketball team was scheduled to practice at 7 a.m., an inconvenient and unproductive time of day for athletes who always played games in late afternoon or evening, according to Coach Nancy Kalafus. Cross country runners had to train on a lawn also used for soccer games. The lawn’s uneven surface and protruding roots increased the possibility of twisted ankles; on the bright side, the lawn’s central location gave the team valuable visibility on campus.

In some sports, the first Ivy League victories were hard to come by. In the first year that the basketball team competed in Division I , the second year of formal Ivy League competition, it came excruciatingly close to its first Ivy win of the season.

On March 2, 1988 the Lions fell 114-111 in a four-overtime heartbreaker to Pennsylvania. The two schools combined for League records in the categories of total points scored (per team and total for two teams), field goals attempted, and free throws made and attempted. All of those records have stood for more than a decade.

Fencing posted some of the greatest successes of the decade under co-head coaches Aladar Kogler and George Kolombatovich, as both a Barnard and Columbia team sport. Coach Sharon Everson’s Barnard team had paved the way with a tenth place finish in the 1982 AIAW championship, with Lisa Piazza placing second in the individual event and earning All-America honors. In 1983 Piazza and Tracy Burton were awarded both All-American and All-Ivy status while representing Columbia. The following year Piazza finished fourth in the NCAA championship and again earned first team All-America honors. The next season Katy Bilodeaux was the individual champion at the NCAA competition, a distinction she repeated in 1987 to become the first two-time titleholder in NCAA history. She was also the first Barnard or Columbia woman to be a four-time first team All-Ivy selection. Her remarkable career was later rewarded with the honor as the top NCAA women’s fencer of the decade, and she subsequently competed in the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

The 1989 fencing team reached an important landmark for all Columbia and Barnard student-athletes when it captured the Consortium’s first Ivy League championship and finished second in the NCAA championship, just one point short of first place. The team then went on to repeat as Ivy champions for the next two seasons, carrying the successful beginnings of the Consortium into the next decade.