Ivy League Sports

By the mid-1990s, the number of women at Dartmouth had increased to nearly half the student body, and gender equity initiatives recommended by a special committee had been adopted. As a result, women’s junior varsity programs in field hockey, lacrosse, and soccer were added; support for recruiting and sports publicity was increased; and volleyball and softball were elevated as fully funded varsity sports. Big Green teams achieved notable and consistent success throughout the decade, earning Ivy League titles in basketball, cross country, ice hockey, and lacrosse.

The cross country team gradually improved its standing in the Ivy League early in the decade, winning the championship with a stunning first-place finish at the Heptagonal championships in 1994. The following year, continuing under coach Ellen O’Neil, the team claimed its second consecutive Ivy League title and was one of 22 (out of 220) teams to qualify for the NCAA championships, where it placed 11th. Dartmouth repeated as Ivy League Heptagonal champions in 1996 and 1997, proceeding in each of those years to the NCAA championships where the team finished fourth both times. Two Dartmouth runners — Jenna Rogers and Anne Devlin — also earned All-America honors in 1997.

The field hockey program started off the decade with losing records, but in 1995 defeated three top-20 teams and claimed the ECAC championship by defeating Yale in overtime. Dartmouth had gained experience during the season by winning three overtime matches in the new experimental overtime format, which called for six-on-six play and goalies for two 15-minute sudden-death periods.

In 1991, the soccer team shared with Cornell its first Ivy League title — a noteworthy accomplishment for the team that finished the Ivy race with a record of 5-1-1, the first in the program’s history to notch five League wins. The 1992 team advanced for the first time to the ECAC tournament and ended the season with a No. 24 national ranking. In 1993, under coach Steve Swanson, the team won its first outright Ivy League championship, earning a place in the NCAA tournament for the first time. Dartmouth continued to advance to postseason play during the remainder of the decade, with appearances in the NCAA championships in 1994, 1996, and 1998 (with an eighth seed, its highest ever). The squad also reached the semifinals of the ECAC tournament in 1995 and won the Adidas Women’s Soccer Cup in Hartford in 1995. In 1997, former Dartmouth star and four-year letterwinner Kelly Blasius-Knudsen was named the new head coach when Swanson went to Stanford, and the Big Green made its first-ever NCAA quarterfinal appearance in 1998, advancing to the Thanksgiving weekend game at perennial powerhouse North Carolina after home victories against Wisconsin and Georgia in the first and second rounds.

The Dartmouth basketball team, which had dominated the Ivy League in the 1980s, started slowly in the early 1990s but took a share of the Ivy title in 1994. The Green subsequently lost a one-game playoff to co-titlist Brown for the right to advance to the NCAA tournament. Those dreams of the “Big Dance” would be fulfilled in 1995 against archrival Harvard in the final game of the regular season, before an Ivy-record crowd of 2,231 fans in Cambridge. With a tenacious defense and balanced scoring attack, Dartmouth beat Harvard, 72-62, for the Ivy championship and was rewarded with a bid to the NCAA tournament, where the Big Green fell, 71-68, in a hard-fought game at third-seeded Virginia. Dartmouth returned to the title ranks in 1999, sharing the Ivy title with Princeton and ensuring that the Class of 1999 would become the 20th straight to depart Hanover with at least one basketball championship on its résumé. The icing on the cake came when Dartmouth reversed its lack of playoff fortune from five years previous and topped Princeton, 61-46, to advance to the NCAA tournament.

Many accomplishments also were recorded in ice hockey, starting with the 1990-91 season when the team went undefeated against Ivy opponents in the regular season and set numerous school records, including longest winning streak (13), most victories in a season (19), most goals (149), most assists (211), and highest number of points (360). The team won the Ivy League title in 1993, shared it with Princeton in 1995, and claimed it alone again in 1998. Teams also went to the ECAC tournaments in 1993, 1996, 1998, and 1999.

An era in Dartmouth ice hockey ended in 1998 when coach George Crowe retired after 12 years, during which not one of his teams had recorded a losing season and four teams had won Ivy titles. Crowe was succeeded by assistant coach Judy Parish, who had been a standout player at Dartmouth and a member of the U.S. National Team that played in the first Women’s World Ice Hockey Championship in 1991.

A major individual accomplishment of the decade occurred when tennis player Trudy Muller was selected as the first Dartmouth woman to receive the Regional Tennis Magazine/Arthur Ashe Jr. Sportsmanship and Leadership award, presented by Rolex USA and the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. Muller was selected in 1996 from athletes representing 80 schools in the Eastern Region. Another student who exemplified the Ivy League’s dual commitment to scholarship and athletics was Kristin Cobb, an All-America distance runner who graduated number one in her class in 1995.

Following national rankings as high as fifth earlier in the decade and one invitation to the NCAA tournament, the 1995 lacrosse team collected the school’s first Ivy title of the 1990s with a perfect 6-0 Ivy record, a number-three national ranking, and a second seed in the NCAA championship, which included a “bye” into the NCAA semifinals, a first in school history. Dartmouth shared the Ivy League title in 1997 with Princeton, then retained it alone in 1998 and 1999. Ranked fourth nationally, the 1998 team notched its first NCAA tournament win with a 9-8 overtime victory over Loyola, but lost in the semifinal game to the University of Virginia. The following year, the Big Green again outlasted Loyola, this time by a 20-8 score, but fell in the quarterfinal round at Virginia.

Dartmouth was represented by an impressive number of Olympians in the 1990s, in addition to ice hockey gold medalists Gretchen Ulion and Sarah Tueting: kayaker Dana Chladek, who took a bronze medal in white water singles slalom at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games; Susan Forbes, Nina Kemppel, and Leslie Thompson, who skied in the 1992 Albertville Olympic Winter Games; Cammy Myler, who competed in luge competition in the 1992, 1994, and 1998 Olympic Winter Games; Thompson, Kemppel, Suzanne King, and Liz McIntyre, who skied in the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games, with McIntyre taking a silver medal in moguls; rower Annie Kakela and kayakers Drusilla von Hengel and Dana Chladek, all of whom competed in the 1996 Atlanta Games, with kayaker Chladek taking the silver medal in the slalom; and skiers Kemppel, McIntyre, and King and biathlete Stacey Wooley, all of whom competed in the 1998 Olympic Winter Games, with King taking a gold medal.