Ivy League Sports

At the core of the Ivy League athletic experience is one word: opportunity. When Ivy women’s championships began, many athletes participated in multiple sports — seeking new challenges and playing because they enjoyed the experience. Often, athletes added a secondary sport during a season in which they were not competing in their primary sport; lacrosse players might take up ice hockey in winter, for instance, when lacrosse was not being played. In the 1970s, Princeton’s Emily Goodfellow and Dartmouth’s Sandy Helve were both multi-sport athletes, as, later, was Princeton’s Mollie Marcoux, who at her graduation in 1991 had earned 12 varsity letters in ice hockey, lacrosse, and soccer.

Perhaps the ultimate example of versatility, however, is Harvard’s Charlotte Joslin, a three-sport star and honors student in the late 1980s. At Harvard, Joslin became the first female athlete to garner All-Ivy honors in three unrelated sports and was selected the Harvard Independent’s Female Athlete of the Decade. A member of Harvard’s 1990 national championship lacrosse team, Joslin not only lettered in field hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse in each of her four years, for an unmatched total of 12 letters, but remains the only athlete in Division I history to be named first-team All-Conference in three sports in the same academic year (1989-90).

Similar to many other women athletes of her era, Joslin began her athletic career at the age of four when her older brother put her in his ice hockey uniform, complete with goalie’s mask and double-runners, and took her to the frozen stream behind their Massachusetts home to help him practice. He fired shot after shot toward her, paying her a penny a shot, until she learned to deflect. She continued to play ice hockey with her brother as she grew, until she received her first benefit from Title IX requirements in middle school, when administrators had to let her join the boys’ team because there was not a team for girls. Joslin’s talent overcame the boys’ initial resentment, and her teammates elected her captain the next year, when she was in the eighth grade. Eight years later, she left Harvard as arguably the best all-around woman athlete in Ivy League history.