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In the early years of Ivy women’s athletics, access to facilities was one of the most important issues for administrators and coaches to resolve: to accommodate new women’s teams, facilities either had to be expanded or men’s teams had to share existing sites, and the latter solution often provoked controversy. The transformation of Columbia’s football field in 1995 is a particularly rewarding story against this background.
In the mid-1990s, under athletic director John Reeves, Columbia made the decision to add three women’s varsity sports: field hockey, lacrosse, and softball. Implementation for softball is expected to occur during the 1999-2000 academic year, but the other two new teams had a fairly immediate need for a practice and playing field. With what Reeves calls Columbia’s “landlocked situation” in New York City, outdoor facilities expansion is nearly impossible but he realized that those sports ideally should be played on an artificial surface, rather than grass, and the extra use resulting from the additional teams would make the maintenance of grass fields extremely difficult and costly.
The solution — replacing grass on the football field with artificial turf — was logical, and the women’s teams were thrilled. But, with the usual preference of football teams for grass over turf, the move could have been controversial.
For Reeves, however, the decision was easy, and was supported by Columbia President George Rupp. “Of all the controversial decisions I’ve had to make since I came to Columbia in 1991,” Reeves says, “[installing AstroTurf] was the easiest one.” Not only was Columbia able to increase use of the field from 25 to 265 days a year — adding practices and games for field hockey and women’s lacrosse, as well as use for recreation, intramurals, and club sports — but, Reeves adds, “I can’t think of any place in the nation where an artificial surface was needed more.”
The change was backed up by a careful investigation of studies of turf, especially regarding the incidence of injuries, and extensive conversations with college and NFL doctors and trainers whose teams play on artificial turf fields. Columbia installed the newly developed AstroTurf XL, with improved resiliency and bounce that generally lasts for eight to ten years.
In all of the steps to the decision, however, perhaps none is as surprising as the way the renovation was financed. With strong support from football coach Ray Tellier, known at Columbia as an advocate of women’s athletics, Reeves raised 75 percent of the total money needed for the project from Columbia’s football alumni (the university contributed the remainder). Reeves calls it a “real tribute to our football alums.” Clearly, it is also a tribute to progress in women’s athletics.
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