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In the fall of 1994, Cornell’s elevation of women’s softball to varsity status made an important statement about the university’s commitment to women’s athletics, but for the next few years, the statement was more symbolic than substantive: the team had a part-time coach, and home games were played on an unfenced, unlighted field with no drainage that was 30 minutes from campus. Yet by 1999, Cornell was an acknowledged softball leader in the East, its program supported by top-notch staff, training, and facilities. How had a new program come so far so fast?
One of the most significant softball improvements came in the fall of 1995 when athletics director Charles H. Moore ’51 hired Dick Blood, a state championship high school coach from New Hampshire, as full-time head coach. In its first two years, Cornell had compiled records of 10-31 and 6-35-1, but Blood brought the team to a new level of training and commitment and, in his first year, won more games than in the two prior years combined. Two years later, in May 1999, Cornell celebrated a 41-9 season record, won its first Ivy League championship, and went to the NCAA tournament for the first time. Essential to the remarkably speedy ascent to the top was the higher caliber of Cornell’s players, led by pitcher Julie Westbrock ’99, a three-time first team All-Ivy selection and the League’s Pitcher of the Year her senior season.
The other crucial element of the program’s development is the Niemand-Robison Softball Field, a state-of-the-art facility dedicated in April 1998 and featuring dual batting cages, bullpens, concrete dugouts, a press box, sound system, and electronic scoreboard. At the old off-campus field, games often started late because umpires couldn’t find it, causing Blood to reach the breaking point in a 1997 game against Colgate, when the umpires arrived at 4:15 for a double-header scheduled to start at 3:00. In the fifth inning of the second game, the umpire called the game when a ball hit the elbow of Cornell rightfielder Jessica Grieg because it was so dark she couldn’t see.
“I was ashamed,” he recalls, “for the university, for our ball club, of the field conditions. That night I came back to campus and started typing. I am not a very good typist, and I typed until midnight. I sent [letters] to Charlie Moore, to the president, I sent them to everybody. . . . I said we have to do something, and we have to do it now. It is unsafe where we play and it is just plain not fair.”
That evening started a development process — led by Moore with the personal support of Cornell President Hunter R. Rawlings, III — that culminated in the new field, made possible by the generous donors who funded what Blood calls a “spectacular complex.” The lead gift came from Arno Niemand ’56, a wrestler during his student years at Cornell, and was supplemented by gifts from the Ellis H. Robison ’18 Fund and the President’s Council of Cornell Women.
Far above Cayuga’s waters, generations of Cornellians had in two years built a symbol of dedication to sport for all of Cornell’s students.
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