Ivy League Sports

When lacrosse and field hockey player Eleanor Shannon stepped onto the Dartmouth campus in the fall of 1975, she expected her college education to include both academics and athletics — just like many students entering Ivy League schools in 1999. The environment in which Shannon found herself, however, was very different from that of today, for she was a pioneer in a decade when the number of women college students was rising dramatically and some institutions were becoming coeducational for the first time. While many on campus welcomed the change, others resisted. Shannon met the challenges and, like other women then and now, says the lessons she learned as a student and an athlete have shaped her personality from those difficult and challenging first days of coeducation through her professional life:

Like most athletes, I learned persistence, the value of hard work, the fact that I could push myself harder than I thought, and the importance of being a part of a team. . . . I remember before a big game against Yale, [head coach] Aggie Kurtz said, “Don’t ever be afraid of failure. Don’t even think of not catching the ball, or of your opponent, or of losing the game. Play hard without holding back. Take what you know out onto the field and play your game.”... I may have arrived at Dartmouth with this attitude, but all of my sports experience affirmed its veracity. After graduation, I taught and coached in a day school in Cambridge, Mass., then went on to do strategy consulting for Fortune 100 companies, attend Harvard Business School, work in Africa for the World Bank, and teach finance at the University of Virginia. Aggie’s words were there as I launched on each new venture.

Across the Ivy League, the 1970s were a time of almost constant change in every aspect of campus life. In athletics, larger numbers of women students led to accelerated requirements for more and better-supported women’s athletic programs. Institutions often struggled to keep pace with student expectations, while trying at the same time to meet Title IX’s new nondiscrimination requirements. Even in the midst of change, however, there were exceptional individual and team accomplishments, as student-athletes, coaches, and administrators worked together to develop new programs and to establish new standards of excellence.

Dedication to academics combined with an appreciation for athletics in forming a well-rounded person had long been a hallmark of the Ivy League. Now, that combination would characterize women students’ experiences as well, even if it took some time to work out the details.

Campus Challenges and Progress

The eight Ivy League institutions exhibited a broad range of decisions regarding coeducation. Brown, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania had long enrolled women, although those schools admitted more women students during the 1970s and heightened attention to meeting their needs. Harvard began to administer Radcliffe’s athletics program in 1972-73, and men’s and women’s admissions were combined for the class entering in the fall of 1975. Barnard remained a separate women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, which would not admit women to Columbia College until 1983. Princeton and Yale first admitted women undergraduates in 1969, followed by Dartmouth in 1971.

For those campuses first experiencing coeducation, the presence of women precipitated changes large and small. When Diane McKoy, now Columbia senior associate dean of admissions, arrived at Yale as a freshman in 1971, she recalls that women in her dormitory who had never seen a urinal were puzzled about the purpose of this strange piece of equipment in their bathrooms, supposedly converted for use by women. Women students were typically housed separately and had more restrictive curfews than men. The social scene, previously centered around weekend mixers between male students of the host college and female students bused in from nearby women’s colleges, evolved gradually to coeducational institution-wide events. Gail Finney, a student in Princeton’s first class that included women, viewed coeducation as equal in effect to campus activism against the Vietnam War. “Both ‘revolutions,’” she says, “were educational, in their different ways.”

Many Ivy League administrators accepted that women students should be given athletic options as part of their college experience — in most cases some combination of traditional physical education classes and intercollegiate competition. The times reflected both a growing understanding of the health benefits of exercise and an increasing appreciation for women’s right to the same opportunities as men, partly as a result of the women’s movement. Women students, many of whom had played competitive sports while growing up, arrived on campus expecting athletic programs comparable to the level they had enjoyed in secondary school.

Although all members of the Ivy League faced similar pressures regarding women’s athletics, each reacted differently in deciding how and at what pace to proceed. Dartmouth and Brown started a number of sports all at once, with programs added whenever a group of students expressed their interests. Yale, Barnard, and to some extent Princeton moved at a more gradual pace, although not a negative one. Yale, for instance, waited for women students to seek from administrators the sports they wanted, and then specified the criteria by which club sports could achieve varsity status. Both administrative styles produced successful programs in the early years of Ivy championship competition.

Administrative titles and responsibilities of those overseeing women’s programs also varied from campus to campus. Princeton hired Merrily Dean Baker as associate director of athletics and director of physical education in 1970, its second year of coeducation; and Arlene Gorton was named assistant director of athletics at Brown in 1968, adding to her role as the director of physical education at Pembroke, where she had been since 1961. Dartmouth hired Agnes Bixler Kurtz as a physical educator in the fall of 1972; she was later given the title of assistant director of athletics. Yale’s program for women was led by Martha Aly as director of women’s activities until 1971, when Joni Barnett was hired to succeed her with the new title of director of physical education. Mary Paget was Radcliffe’s director of dance, physical education, and recreation until control of women’s athletics was transferred to Harvard; after that, Niki Janus was brought in as an assistant director of athletics to oversee the women’s program.

As these administrators started programs, typically from scratch, they often had to be both courageous and creative. Dean Baker remembers going to the head of the Princeton crew program to discuss starting women’s crew: I was faced with a man who was twice my age who stood there with his feet apart, planted on the ground, his arms across his chest, and he looked me right in the eye and he said, “There will be women in this boathouse over my dead body.” As a young, 26-year-old, I took my courage up, took a deep breath, and I looked at him very quietly and I said, “Well, I did not come to ask for your permission; I came to ask for your help.”

Since he would not provide assistance, Dean Baker went to a nearby prep school and convinced them to let her athletes row in their lake when it was not being used by their teams. She bought used oars and shells, recruited a coach, and went out with the team at 6:00 a.m. to practice. After the first year, when the women’s team came in third at the collegiate national championship, she returned to the men’s coach. This time he agreed to let the women’s crew row at 2:00 p.m. on Princeton’s lake; in that second year, they won the national championship.

Arlene Gorton often served in a similar advocacy — and educational — role at Brown. Phil Pincince, women’s head soccer coach, credits Gorton with many instances of crucial intervention when he arrived at Brown in 1977 to develop the new women’s team:

I said to Arlene, “Where do we play the home games for the women’s team?” She said, “Well, the men have their practice field, you will have your own practice field, and we have Stevenson Field for the game field … that is the game field, it is not the men’s game field.” So my first match ever as a Brown coach, we are playing Tufts University on a Saturday morning and it is misting out. I walk out to Stevenson Field just to check the field and benches and … nothing is out. . . . [The game] got moved to the men’s practice field. So I go up to the grounds crew, and I said, “We are playing on Stevenson.” They said, “No, the men’s soccer coach called and he does not want the girls ruining his field.” … I call Arlene. Arlene comes in and straightens them out. Where do you think we played our first match? Stevenson Field. So that was my first confrontation with the men’s soccer coach, saying we are here, women’s soccer is alive, and … there is going to be some equality here.

Even with such strong leadership, the process of establishing women’s programs faced many challenges, beginning with the limitation that most coaches, male or female, were part-time and often were assigned to more than one sport.

A large number taught physical education or other courses; many had little or no previous coaching experience; some were students on men’s teams; and a few even held off-campus jobs. When Cathy Fulford starting coaching volleyball at Brown in 1978, she worked as a cook at a children’s center from 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. each weekday, then drove to campus in late afternoon to practice with her team. Yet many outstanding coaches initiated successful programs during the 1970s and still hold those positions today. In fact, entering the 1998-99 season, 21 coaches of women’s sports had at least 20 years of tenure in the Ivy League.

Other challenges involved uniforms, equipment, facilities, scheduling, and travel. Improvisation was often required. Princeton’s Dean Baker recalls that, in only her third week on the job, tennis players Margie Gengler and Helena Novatakova asked her if they could represent the university in the Eastern Tennis Championship in New Paltz, N.Y. Baker bought two Princeton shirts from the bookstore, ironed the women’s names on the backs of the shirts, and drove the players in her van to the event. She had to launch the entire women’s program, she says, “very quickly because we had a group of 250 young women there and me. That was it. No equipment, no uniforms, no money, no facilities, no nothing. But they came with high expectations of being able to continue doing what they had been doing in their lives, and I was there to facilitate that.”