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When Lawrie Mifflin entered Yale in the fall of 1969, the first year for women undergraduates on campus, it was but one of many “firsts” in her distinguished career. From her athletic accomplishments to her professional distinctions, Mifflin has been both a founder of women’s athletics and an ambassador for them.
Mifflin’s pioneering spirit manifested itself early in her Yale career. After discovering that Yale offered no field hockey program, she started a club team and arranged scrimmages with other colleges in the area. Selected as a co-captain for the 1972 team with Sandy Morse, Mifflin refused to be named the sole captain (it is traditional at Yale for each team to have just one captain) when the team became one of Yale’s first three varsity sports for women. Thus, Mifflin and Morse were elected as what is believed to be the first co-captains of a Yale sport, men’s or women’s. But Mifflin wasn’t finished. Determined to secure some form of media attention for women’s athletic contests, she volunteered to cover them herself and became the first woman sports staffer at the Yale Daily News.
Drawn to a post-graduate career in journalism, Mifflin began work at the New York Daily News, where her interest in women’s athletics and pressure for coverage of the 1976 AIAW basketball championship earned her a position as the newspaper’s first female sportswriter. Her assignments took her to the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, where she covered gymnastics legend Nadia Comaneci and the first women’s basketball competition. As a beat reporter for the New York Rangers, she was one of the first women to cover the NHL and one of the only women to cover the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey triumph over the Soviet Union. Later a sportswriter and next the deputy sports editor for The New York Times, Mifflin became a founding member of the Professional Soccer Reporters Association of America, as well as an early member of the Association for Women in Sports Media.
Lawrie Mifflin’s pivotal roles in the birth and development of women’s athletics, and in bringing them to national audiences, earned her special honors as the only Ivy League woman to receive the NCAA Silver Anniversary Award, an esteemed credit bestowed on exceptional former student-athletes 25 years after their graduation. Now a culture editor for The Times, Mifflin’s groundbreaking achievements have left an indelible imprint on the past, present, and future of women in sport.
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