Ivy League Sports

In the fall of 1969, when the first 544 women entered Yale College, their athletic activities were directed by Martha Aly, the inaugural director of women’s activities. The women were allowed to become members of Payne Whitney Gymnasium, the renowned home of the men’s athletic teams where men previously had walked the halls in the nude, and the 402 women who joined were offered instruction in physical education and recreation. Women’s activities were handled by two women physical educators, a part-time secretary, and several part-time instructors. Aly indicated that intercollegiate sports teams would be inaugurated when women expressed an interest in organized competition.

Like the rather cautious moves during that first fall, Yale’s athletic program for women reflected a gradual and deliberate expansion for most of the decade, with progressive developments nearly always made at the instigation of students. In that first spring of 1970, for example, when several women tennis players expressed interest in forming a team, Dorothy O’Connor was hired part-time as coach and instructor. O’Connor was paid $200 for a month-long season of three two-hour coaching sessions per week and a three-match schedule. Other matters intervened, however, to interrupt the plans. Bad weather required cancellation of the first two weeks of practice, and only one match was played because of “preparations for the rally in sympathy for the Black Panthers,” as O’Connor reported to Aly (a reference to the New Haven murder trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale, and to the many demonstrations associated with it, which were intensified at Yale by reactions to the United States’ bombing of Cambodia and to the shootings of students at South Carolina and Kent State universities in demonstrations about the bombing).

By that fall, the number of women students had grown to 803, and field hockey was added to tennis, both still as club sports. Support for tennis was growing slowly, but field hockey suffered from the bare minimum of equipment, practice on a rut-filled field that doubled as a parking lot for football games, and uneven commitment on the part of players, who sometimes didn’t show up in sufficient numbers to field teams for a scrimmage. Donna Claxton, a member of the first varsity field hockey team at Yale in 1973, recently recalled some of the era’s issues:

What I remember is picking up glass and charcoal on Monday mornings after the football tailgates because that was the field we played on. When they finally gave us uniforms, they told us we’d have to wash our own uniforms. We were in the basement of the field house, whereas the guys were upstairs. The football players had managers and all that, and what they gave us was a washer to wash our clothes.

Prior to Claxton’s arrival, progress had been made in several areas in the 1972-73 academic year. Tennis became the first varsity sport in the spring of 1972, followed by field hockey that fall and squash in the winter of 1973. Club teams were added in basketball, gymnastics, fencing, and swimming and diving. And women signaled their expectations of equity when the team captains of the three varsity sports adopted the time-honored tradition of the men’s captains by posing for pictures in their “Y” sweaters atop a section of the old “Yale fence.”

Also in 1972-73, Joni Barnett, who had succeeded Martha Aly in 1971, requested an increased budget of nearly $50,000 for women’s intercollegiate sports. Barnett said she wanted to offer Yale women a program comparable to those of Princeton and Radcliffe and emphasized that her proposed increases “are proportional to the growth of the number of women being served, the development of certain aspects of the program, and the awareness of Yale women that equality in the area of athletics and physical education is their right. Without the needed funds the university will not be adequately meeting its responsibilities to Yale women.” The university did allocate some funds to women’s athletics in response to Barnett’s request, although she would have to renew her pleas in the future.

By mid-decade, as club teams were added and others were given varsity status, a committee had formally established criteria for elevating a team from club to varsity status, and Barnett was continuing to press for increased women’s athletics budgets. A Yale Title IX study issued in December 1975, however, pointed out “discrepancies, some major, some minor,” between men’s and women’s sports. The women’s lacrosse and field hockey teams, for instance, shared a single set of shoes, whereas men were not sharing baseball, lacrosse, or football shoes because the shoes differed for each sport. Men’s teams were issued practice uniforms, which they returned after each practice to be laundered for them. Women’s teams were also issued practice uniforms, but they had to wash the clothes themselves. Additional concerns included the lack of shower and dressing facilities for women rowers at the Derby boathouse, undesirable practice times for the women’s basketball team, lack of lights for field hockey and lacrosse practice areas, and one full-time trainer for women while the men’s teams had four.

However gradual their beginnings, Yale’s women athletes had achieved athletic prominence by the end of the decade. The swimming and diving team never had a losing season during the 1970s and won an Ivy League title in 1978. In 1974-75, the fencing team won the New England Intercollegiate Team Championships. The next year, the women’s crew captured Yale’s first Ivy League championship in any women’s sport. Three years later, the crew won first place at the Eastern Sprints and did the same at the national championships. Previously, in 1977, Yale won the first League title in gymnastics, beginning a dynasty that was exhibited by victories in seven of the next 12 championships. There were also important individual achievements. Senior tennis captain Lisa Rosenblum won the singles title at the 1975 New England Championships; her four straight titles became Yale’s first. And Anne Keating, a 1977 graduate, won nine varsity letters and was the first three-sport woman athlete at Yale. In her senior year, she captained the field hockey team and set a Yale record for most goals (23) in one season that still stands.