Ivy League Sports

Princeton moved quickly to create a comprehensive athletic program for the first group of 148 women who were among the 3,400 undergraduates in the fall of 1969. In 1970, Merrily Dean Baker was brought in to develop women’s physical education and intercollegiate sports teams as associate director of athletics and director of physical education. The central theme of this effort was summarized in a 1975 publication, Women’s Athletics at Princeton:

Pursuit of excellence through quality coaching, facilities, support, and competitive experience is the goal being pursued by the athletic department staff. Athletics are an integral part of the Princeton experience for a large percentage of students, and it is our pledge to continue to provide the kind of opportunities which meet the needs and interests of our student-athletes in the most relevant way possible.

Princeton not only established a comprehensive program — with intercollegiate competition in 14 sports, nearly all varsity-level — but achieved recognized standards of excellence throughout the decade in several of them. In tennis, for example, which started in 1971 as the first women’s varsity sport, teams did not lose a single match in five years. The respect earned in those early competitions helped attract additional skilled players to the university. Led by four coaches in that period (Eve Kraft, Ann Marie Hicks, Carla Gaiser, and Maree McCallum), tennis teams won the Middle States women’s intercollegiate tennis championships every year from 1971 through 1979. In 1979 the team made its first appearance in the national tennis championships, and then closed out its first decade by sharing the first Ivy League women’s championship, with Yale, in April 1980.

Major successes also came in basketball, which began in 1971, at the same time that the five-player, full-court game and the 30-second clock were incorporated into national rules for women After struggling for its first years, new coach Pat Walsh’s team won the first Ivy League basketball tournament, held in December 1974 at Princeton. This round-robin tournament with six teams was squeezed into two days by scheduling games of two 15-minute halves. For the remainder of the decade, the basketball team dominated the Ivy League, winning the League title for four straight years. Key to those victories were Coach Walsh’s introduction of a “man-to-man” defense, instead of the zone defense most women’s teams played, and the stellar play of Claire Beth (“C. B.”) Tomasiewicz, who still holds the school records for career scoring average (17.1), career field goals (663), and career steals (329).

Squash players were responsible for a third area of outstanding accomplishment, benefiting for two decades from the championship coaching of Betty Constable. In the 1970s, Princeton’s squash team had an overall 50-4 record and won the Howe Cup seven times, beginning with the first competition of the cup’s Intercollegiate Division, in 1973. One of the team stars during this period was Wendy Zaharko, who in 1972 was Princeton’s first WISRA individual champion and who went on to win the title again in 1974 and 1975. Another was Emily Goodfellow, who became the first Princeton athlete, male or female, to earn 12 varsity letters when she graduated in 1976.

Teams in other sports also marked significant victories over the course of the decade. The crew won the first regatta of the New England Association of Women’s Rowing Colleges, held in 1972, absent a formal Ivy League title. The next year, the field hockey team won the “H-Y-P” title, patterned on the men’s long-standing competition among Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. That victory, in the team’s first year of competition, was repeated in 1974. Nationally, Princeton hosted the AIAW field hockey championship in 1979 and ended the decade as the sixth-ranked team in national competition.

The swimming and diving team won the Eastern Intercollegiate championships twice during the 1970s; finished third in the AIAW championships in 1973; and won the first Ivy League championship, held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. Meanwhile, the cross country team, which debuted in the fall of 1976, won the Ivy title in 1978 and 1979, while the outdoor track and field team took its first League championship in 1979.