Ivy League Sports

The Ivy Game in the National Spotlight

As women’s athletic programs in the 1980s were expanding and becoming better established at the individual college or university level, the national context in which programs operated was changing. The national direction of changes seemed to be both backwards and forwards, depending on the specific question, but Ivy schools generally were successful in using national developments to support their progress.

The Title IX regulation, promulgated in 1972, had set a 1978 compliance deadline, and the federal government’s enforcement measures during the 1970s both added clout to the law and reassured women’s athletics leaders at educational institutions. Students and coaches also were well aware of what the law had done for them. The Radcliffe crew at Harvard named one of their boats “Title IX,” according to coach Liz O’Leary, out of concern “that a lot of the women were not aware of what Title IX was, [but] needed to be.”

Into the 1980s, the Ivy League schools also were conducting the required evaluations to determine if they were in compliance with Title IX. The conclusion of Yale’s evaluation, as reported in a June 10, 1982, news release, was typical:

Yale University is providing male and female athletes equivalent treatment, benefits, and opportunities in the following areas: scheduling of games and practice times, travel and per diem allowances, tutoring, practice and competitive facilities, housing and dining services and facilities, the provision of participation opportunities, support services, coaches, locker rooms, equipment and supplies, medical and training facilities and services, and quality of competitive schedules.

Then, in 1984, in the case of Grove City v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to jeopardize the progress stimulated by Title IX when it ruled that the regulation applied only to those parts of educational institutions that received federal funds directly. Because few athletic programs did (or do, currently) receive direct federal funding, many schools believed themselves freed from the equity requirement and began to cut back on women’s programs. Although this holding was overturned by legislation in 1988, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, the intervening period included little federal enforcement.

While Grove City generated concern among supporters of women’s collegiate athletics across the country, Ivy League schools did not seem affected by it. In fact, minutes from a 1986 League meeting — exactly at the midpoint between the Grove City decision and its reversal — report discussion of more rather than less competition in women’s sports, partly in an attempt to gain additional national opportunities. During this time, a number of League schools added women’s sports, while others began varied levels of support for club teams that they intended to elevate to varsity status over time.

In addition to Title IX developments, major changes were taking place at the national level regarding the way women’s intercollegiate sports were governed. In the 1970s, the leaders of women’s programs in institutions across the country had coordinated policies and competitions through the AIAW. The women who founded the AIAW had done so with a philosophy that emphasized balancing academics with athletics, encouraging widespread participation, and rejecting scholarships. That perspective on college-level athletics was therefore much closer to that of the Ivy League than that of the NCAA, the national organization that had long governed national competitions and championships for the men’s programs. In fact, when the AIAW was established, it was done in a conscious attempt to avoid the problems its leaders believed the men’s policies had generated.

Administrators of Ivy League programs had long assumed prominent roles in the AIAW leadership: in 1981, Merrily Dean Baker of Princeton was president-elect, Arlene Gorton of Brown was the ethics and eligibility chairperson, Louise O’Neal of Dartmouth was the commissioner-elect of Division I championships, and others served at various times on many committees. Gorton recalls that the Ivy representatives “were the first to have a conference [represented] in AIAW. When I first started going to the AIAW meetings, we would have the Ivy conference. They used to tease us … but it was amazing how many other schools followed suit.”

The prominence of Ivy women in the AIAW also had occurred, according to Dean Baker, because those schools’ programs for women were so strong, well run, and built on the AIAW model, so “the leadership outside of the Ivy League recognized the leadership within the Ivy League and called upon it at that national level.”

Yet, in spite of — some say, because of — the successes of AIAW, the men’s collegiate administrators who comprised the NCAA governance structure in the early 1980s began to present the case to university presidents that women’s sports should become part of the NCAA. Merrily Dean Baker suggests that the NCAA’s interest was piqued around 1978, “when AIAW was entering its first million-dollar television contract for its championships … and it became clear that the NCAA realized that there was money to be made in women’s athletics.” Dean Baker finds this surge of interest ironic because when she and her peers had started AIAW in the early 1970s, there was zero interest among the men for women’s athletics. Zero. The NCAA had been approached by many of us women on numerous occasions … to ask if they would start women’s programs. We were told flat-out by Walter Byers [long-time NCAA executive director] that the NCAA is a men’s athletic organization and it will never have women’s programs. That was essentially the bottom line.

When the NCAA leadership’s interest changed in the early 1980s, according to Dean Baker, the association’s leaders “approached several women in the AIAW and began to woo them with the notion of ‘we want to start women’s championships, we will pay all of your expenses to come.’” For a couple of years, depending on the sport, institutions could choose to go to either the AIAW championship or the NCAA championship. But the NCAA gained ground with its financial clout, based on revenue from pre-existing television contracts, that the AIAW could not match.

The AIAW leaders, knowing an NCAA takeover would spell the end of their organization, waged an emotional battle to survive, filing an ultimately unsuccessful anti-trust suit against the NCAA. Dean Baker characterizes those years as “a very difficult time for women in athletics … being pulled by two different groups. . . . There were women who had been colleagues and friends for years who were not speaking to one another over this issue.” Some women, she recalls, “were so devastated that they left the profession.”

Nevertheless, the NCAA was able to convince most institutional presidents, including those in the Ivy League, that there were benefits in having one organization supervising all collegiate athletics and that the NCAA offered expanded opportunities in postseason play beyond what the AIAW could provide. When the decision became inevitable, the AIAW shut down, and in spite of the lingering effects of the bitter battle, many Ivy League women leaders helped to ease the transition from AIAW to NCAA governance. Dean Baker, who three years later accepted a position on the NCAA executive committee, says she and others had to be pragmatists and accept the transition because of their essential concern about the growth and development of women’s athletics, whatever organization was administering it. When some questioned her joining the NCAA board, she responded, “This is the organization that is now controlling athletics, and I would like to be on their decision-making board. . . . I felt that within the governance, we could shape the situation to make sure we retained the good things and minimize the loss of those things as we moved from organization to organization.”

As a consequence of this transition, during the mid-1980s Ivy League schools began participating in their first NCAA championships and, in some cases, winning. In fencing, for example, Yale won the championship in both 1984 and 1985, as Pennsylvania did in 1986. Dartmouth advanced to the NCAA basketball tournament in 1983, while Columbia participated in the 1986 Division III basketball tournament before it began play in Division I the following year. In lacrosse, Harvard, Penn, and Princeton advanced to the NCAA tournament in 1983, and Harvard returned in 1984 (along with Yale), 1988, and 1989 (with Princeton). Penn was invited to the NCAA field hockey championship in five of ten years beginning in 1983 and is the only Ivy school to host the NCAA semifinals and finals, in both 1988 and 1998. Brown, Harvard, and Princeton all posted at least one appearance in the NCAA soccer championship during the decade, and the Bears, dominant in the sport during the decade, advanced to the quarterfinals in 1983 and 1984.

A further development in women’s athletics at the national level during this period was the increased visibility for women’s teams and individual players in the media. During the 1970s, there had been little media coverage of women athletes. Even school newspapers typically limited their exposure to occasional notable accomplishments, rather than regular reports on games and features about players as were published on the men. In the 1980s, however, as audiences grew, schools and conferences increased their level of effort, and the media published more. These three trends also reinforced each other.

Dartmouth’s Slattery points out that her office’s publicity attempts have generally emphasized cultivating their local media, which she says “has always been very receptive to women’s athletics.” Since the media always are interested in covering the school’s most successful athletes and most successful teams, Dartmouth women’s teams have also benefited as “more often than not our most successful athletes and most successful teams come from women’s athletics.”

Making coverage of women’s sports an organizational priority was key. Chuck Yrigoyen, Ivy League associate director since 1989, worked in the sports information office at Princeton for most of the decade, serving as director from 1985 to 1989. He recalls the strong emphasis placed on getting coverage for women’s sports, even in his initial interview for the job, and was able to achieve good coverage of those areas in the regional newspapers, including feature stories on women athletes as well as daily results of both men’s and women’s teams.

In addition to school-level efforts, the Ivy League office in 1986 took over League-wide publicity for the first time and, under executive director Jeff Orleans and then-associate director Constance Huston Hurlbut (a former Penn student-athlete), emphasized equal treatment for women and the promotion of women’s athletics, especially in its annual record book, basketball media guide, weekly releases, and highlights of specific honors. The League office’s focus on women’s athletics is seen today on its website (www.ivyleague.princeton.edu) and in its sponsorship in 1998-99 of the Silver Anniversary Celebration of Ivy League Women’s Championships, which included this book’s research and publication.