Ivy League Sports

During this formative period of women’s athletics, the Ivy League did not exist as a formal entity, and it was only in the mid-1970s that the League officially adopted women’s sports. Teams from the eight Ivy institutions — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale — had competed against each other in various men’s sports, albeit not systematically, since the mid-19th century. But the first “Ivy Group Agreement” was not signed until 1945 and addressed only football. In February 1954, the date generally considered the founding of the Ivy League, the original agreement was extended to all sports, and formal competition began in the fall of 1956. The agreement affirmed the observance of common practices in academic standards and eligibility requirements and the forgoing of athletic scholarships. Its basic intent was to improve and foster intercollegiate athletics, while keeping the emphasis on such competition in harmony with the educational purpose of the institutions. These tenets, and the 1954 Agreement, remain the basis of Ivy competition and organization today under the Ivy presidents’ governance.

Yet coeducation would not become universal in the League’s schools until the early 1970s, providing each campus with a distinct set of issues and challenges in the development of a women’s athletics program. Brown, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania had been coeducational for much of the century. Brown also had admitted women to its coordinate women’s college, Pembroke, since 1891. Harvard and Columbia progressed through the early part of the century as all-male colleges with nearby sister, yet separate, institutions in Radcliffe and Barnard. Harvard and Radcliffe merged their admissions departments and other offices in the fall of 1974, having transferred the administration and oversight for athletics to Harvard in 1972, while Columbia and Barnard formed a unique consortium in 1983 that allows Barnard athletes to participate on Columbia teams. Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale were all-male institutions until becoming coeducational between 1969 and 1972, thereby establishing an environment in which Ivy League women’s athletics could be formalized.

Official Ivy competition in women’s sports began in May 1974, with the first championship awarded in rowing. However, women’s athletics existed at some Ivy institutions long before the 1970s. In 1881, for example, Dr. Dudley Sargent of Harvard responded favorably to requests from Radcliffe students who wanted to learn gymnastics and directed that an old carriage house be remodeled for their use. An outdoor “basket-ball field” was added in 1894, and interclass competition was initiated for the fall of 1895. Radcliffe women played intercollegiate tennis as early as the spring of 1896, when they defeated Wellesley College, and varsity competition in basketball, field hockey, swimming, and tennis also was supported; teams most often competed against other local women’s institutions and Seven Sister schools. The Radcliffe program initiated by physical training instructor Margaret Wallace was turned over in 1898 to Elizabeth Wright, a graduate of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, and in 1899, Wright was one of five women appointed to the Women’s Basket Ball Rules Committee — the first instance of women in the physical education profession organizing athletics for women.

Radcliffe coaches in the 1960s presented an exception to the usual practice of the time in not automatically being drawn from the physical education faculty — they were selected instead on the basis of their competitive experience. Coaches were part-time and sometimes coached two sports, but administrators believed that these specialists were more qualified to develop training, and to instill in students a respect for the demands of competition, than physical educators. Nevertheless, limited space, shoestring budgets, and the uncertainties of scheduling gave women’s sports a more casual appearance than the men’s at Harvard, and practices tended to be flexible and noncompulsory.

When the Women’s College Adjunct to Brown University opened in 1891, students soon began participating in calisthenics and Swedish gymnastics. In 1897, a Department of Physical Culture was established, and interclass competition in a variety of sports became an important tradition. Varsity basketball teams began to compete in the early 1900s, leading up to a five-game schedule in 1922, and interclass baseball games eventually led to intercollegiate competition started in 1928. Field days were also held during this period, with classes vying against each other in baseball, track and field events, and other sporting activities.

Pembroke marked a major achievement in the 1960s when it became the first school in the United States to establish a women’s collegiate ice hockey program. The preliminaries to that move included an experiment in which the men’s ice hockey coach requested that field hockey player Nancy Schieffelin dress in a man’s uniform and had her practice with the men’s team. Schieffelin proved that day that she could compete at the sport, and when the women’s team was started with 20 players they practiced regularly with the men’s team. Like many of the early women’s teams, the women’s ice hockey players struggled to gain support: they were coached by a volunteer, Eddie Woodcock, and had to raise money to defray their expenses, including selling black and white buttons proclaiming “Panda Power,” in honor of their mascot name.

Women at Cornell engaged in basketball and rowing as early as 1897, with interclass competitions held in these sports by 1900; the addition of rowing also brought the arrival of Ellen Canfield, Cornell’s first woman physical training instructor. Field hockey was added soon after the turn of the century, and fencing also was offered early in the women’s athletics program’s development. In 1930, the fencing team won the National Intercollegiate Women’s Fencing Association championship by defeating the defending champions from New York University. Cornell’s Elizabeth Ross won the individual fencing title in 1930 and in 1931, as did Grace Acel in 1942 and 1943.

Cornell’s riflery and archery teams held telegraphic competitions in the 1930s with teams from other institutions, and interclass athletic events, intramural competitions between residence halls, and play days and sports days also were popular. Dorothy Bateman was director of women’s physical education from her arrival in 1920 until she retired and was succeeded by Martha Arnett in 1960.

Barnard College opened in 1889, and by 1900 a basketball team, coached by a Columbia student, was competing against such schools as Bryn Mawr. An athletic association was active as early as the fall of 1903 and had established regulations for basketball and tennis. Then, on October 5, 1903, the association announced that games with other schools would be ended and only interclass games would be played henceforth. These events often were held in conjunction with campus celebrations and with such holidays as Thanksgiving.

Important traditions were begun at Barnard during this period. Students held their first Field Day in April 1904, a celebration of the first anniversary of the acquisition of Milbank Quadrangle. Members of all four classes paraded in caps and gowns from the college to the quadrangle, where they listened to speeches and watched a basketball game between juniors and the varsity scrub team comprised of sophomores and freshmen. Other activities that day included baseball and basketball throws, quoits, a tennis match, and the singing of college and class songs. Barnard’s Greek Games had been initiated a year earlier, including contests in poetry, archery, jumping, wrestling, and tug-of-war. This annual celebration was primarily an athletic event until 1908 when sophomores introduced competition in chorus and dance. Agnes R. Wayman, Barnard’s head of physical education, described the appeal of the games as emphasizing participation: Not just the dancer or the athlete, nor just the girl with artistic tendencies, but the girl with executive ability, the poet, the musician, the girl with dramatic ability, the seamstress, the girl with business ability, the girl with creative imagination — each and all can find an outlet for her interest in the production of the games.

This long-standing tradition did not survive the late 1960s when students looked beyond campus traditions for involvement and relevance. In 1968 the games were replaced by a Spring Festival.

Wayman, who directed Barnard’s program from 1918 until her retirement in 1955, became one of the physical education profession’s most influential and prolific writers. The profession advocated a conservative approach to women’s sports focused on intramurals, interclass competition, pageants, and play and sports days. Although not opposed to competition, Wayman was determined to chart an alternative to the men’s model of intercollegiate athletics, which she believed overemphasized winning, exploited athletes, and recruited athletes unfairly. At Barnard, she developed a sport and physical education program that minimized emphasis on star athletes while providing activities centering on the needs and interests of each student.

The women’s athletics program at the University of Pennsylvania was comparable to Barnard’s in some ways, but also reflected key differences. In the 1920-21 school year, women students at Penn participated in basketball classes for the first time and played eight games in intercollegiate competition, all under the direction of the women’s division of the physical education department. That year the women also organized the Women’s Athletic Association (WAA) and collected membership dues of one dollar that were used, along with faculty contributions and the help of a generous contractor, to construct tennis courts. An honorary athletic fraternity, Upsilon Sigma Nu, was founded in 1921 to recognize excellence in athletics, and by 1925, the women’s program also included field hockey and swimming.

In 1926, in a move consistent with the trend sweeping the country, WAA president Dorothy Schoell announced the virtual end of the intercollegiate program and a transition to intramural and interclass sports and play days, with more emphasis on participation by greater numbers of women. By the 1935-36 academic year, however, intercollegiate competition had returned in an even more comprehensive format. Penn women competed against other schools in basketball, field hockey, swimming, and tennis; and while intramural events continued by the end of the decade, the intercollegiate program was receiving the athletic association’s primary attention. Basketball, field hockey, and swimming were considered “major” sports, while archery, fencing, golf, riding, riflery, and tennis were designated “minor” sports.

Expansion continued at Penn over the next decade, along with such successes as winning the Eastern Intercollegiate Swimming Championships in a telegraphic meet in 1940. Intercollegiate softball and diving were added in 1941, and by the 1945-46 academic year the women’s program had been given locker rooms, showers, and offices in Weightman Hall, formerly an all-male habitat. Also that year, the Athlon was organized to supersede the earlier honorary athletic society. Election to Athlon membership was based on a system of points awarded for “enthusiasm, dependability, sportsmanship, and responsibility in their participation in sports,” according to the Philadelphia Record.

The pre-Ivy League era of women’s athletics at Ivy colleges thus reflected the beginnings of women’s involvement in sports and exercise programs nationally, involving both intramural and intercollegiate competitions. As the 1970s began, debates in Ivy institutions over the role of women in society, as well as over women’s abilities as athletes, and their opportunities to participate in institutional athletics programs, paralleled broader national controversies.

Ivy women in the first two-thirds of the 20th century had gradually sought, and gained, their rights first simply to exercise, and then to participate in intramural and intercollegiate sports. Throughout the rest of the century, Ivy women students would seek — and, most often, find — a gradually increasing level of support for women’s athletics that was founded in those rights and that produced unprecedented opportunities for individual growth and competitive success.