Ivy League Sports

Though the University of Pennsylvania has a long history of coeducation and had supported women’s sports activities since 1916, attitudes on campus were not always focused on women athletes’ most significant achievements. The 1970 yearbook, for instance, reported the beginning of women’s athletics with these words: “Can a university with coeds rated by Mademoiselle among the best-dressed in the country still have great girls’ intercollegiate teams? Look at us! Spring and fall 1969 brought Penn’s distaff team an impressive 28-12-1 record.”

The university administration, however, had responded seriously to the booming interest in women’s athletics by calling upon Marie Darlington, director of women’s intercollegiate athletics, to reorganize Penn’s student-run Women’s Athletic Association (WAA) into a vehicle for improving intercollegiate sports and intramural activities. An active WAA with student involvement and a campus located fortuitously near other colleges and universities -- thus reducing travel expenses -- facilitated development of the program. Though teams played abbreviated schedules and received little attention even in the university media, the 1972 yearbook acknowledged that “until recently women’s sports [had] drifted along in a state of benign neglect” and praised the WAA for inspiring interest in women’s sports.

Individual students also helped agitate for improved women’s programs. A reporter in the Evening Bulletin of October 2, 1972, suggested that “the first real indication that the women athletes were tired of second-class treatment was given two years ago when some of the women took off their clothes and sat nude in the men’s sauna.” That event, which required the local police to remove the women from the sauna, provoked a better awareness of the issues.

By the end of the decade, conditions for women athletes had improved, and Connie Van Housen was promoted in 1978 to the position of assistant director of the Division of Recreation and Intercollegiate Athletics, the first woman administrator of men’s and women’s programs at Penn. Throughout the decade, Penn women had achieved success, starting with two-time Olympian Ellie Daniel, the university’s star swimmer during the 1970 and 1971 seasons and the first Penn woman to win an Olympic medal.

At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, before entering college, Daniel had won a gold medal in the 400-meter medley relay, a silver in the 100-meter butterfly, and a bronze in the 200-meter butterfly. In the 1972 Munich Olympics, she again took the bronze medal in the 200-meter butterfly. Like Daniel, badminton co-captain Laura Key achieved a Penn first when she participated in the AIAW national championship in 1975. Badminton was a varsity sport at the university in the 1970s, and Key’s appearance was the first time a Penn player had competed at that level.

Penn also played a role in squash history when squash coach Ann Wetzel, along with Princeton coach Betty Howe Constable, pioneered the expansion of intercollegiate competition in the sport. In the 1950s the Howe Cup had been established as an inter-city competition among teams in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. In 1973, Wetzel and Constable established an intercollegiate division of the Howe Cup, and Constable’s mother, Margaret Howe, donated the trophy for the new division. (Story, page 50) Team accomplishments of the decade included Penn’s first Ivy League volleyball championship in the fall of 1977.