 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The most heralded basketball program in the history of Ivy League women’s sports has been that of Dartmouth College — which has won or shared 12 League titles in the 1980s and ‘90s, the most of any Ivy institution. In the 1980s, Dartmouth won Ivy championships in nine out of ten years, losing only in 1984. In 1983, under head coach Chris Wielgus, the team advanced to the preliminary round of the NCAA tournament but lost to Monmouth, 77-58. Still, this first NCAA appearance was the first for an Ivy team and was a welcome sign of progress, as the team’s initial Ivy championship had been in 1980. As Kathy Slattery, who was shortly thereafter promoted to director of sports publicity, wrote after that championship: “It was a crowning achievement for Coach Chris Wielgus and Dartmouth, whose basketball program for women had finally come of age after many growing pains. There were years of crowding into vans rather than Vermont Transit buses, box lunches rather than hot training meals, but now in 1980, everything had fallen into place.”
Center Gail Koziara was key to the basketball team’s dominance in the first years of the decade. When she graduated in 1982, Koziara was Dartmouth’s all-time leading rebounder and scorer in both men’s and women’s basketball, with 1,933 points and 1,635 rebounds in 89 games; a three-time Ivy Player of the Year, she had become the first Ivy League woman to receive an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship. A two-time Academic All-American, Koziara continues to hold the NCAA record for career rebounding average (18.37 per game) and the Ivy record for total career rebounds and average. Koziara also excelled in track and field, claiming four straight Heptagonal shot-put titles as well as first place in the discus her senior year.
Jayne Daigle followed Koziara and quickly became another Dartmouth star: Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 1983 and Player of the Year in 1986. A Kodak District All-American in 1986, Daigle holds second place on the school’s career scoring and rebounding lists and was a two-time Ivy League scoring leader and four-time first team All-Ivy selection.
Liz Walter entered Dartmouth in 1985, was named Rookie of the Year in 1985-86, then captained her team to two Ivy League championships. Yet, after three years of basketball, Walter quit the team her senior year to join a program to prepare for graduate study in biology, beginning with travels through Costa Rica and Jamaica visiting a rain forest and seeing experimental projects in tropical agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry. Walter says many failed to understand her decision, yet she credits her experiences with basketball, ironically, with preparing her for leaving the sport. “It taught me,” she said in 1989 on her way to the jungle, “that challenges are the best teachers. My stint in the tropics, I hope, will help me get ready for the biggest away game of them all: life after graduation.” Walter attended medical school after Dartmouth and is now a resident in psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
 |
|
|
