Ivy League Sports

In 1974, Harvard had hired Bob Scalise to coach men’s lacrosse and soccer, but the next fall Karen Pheiffer and Nancy Levin told him they wanted to form a women’s soccer club and asked him to be their coach. Scalise took the idea to his superiors. After getting their approval, Scalise held practices on the men’s field the following fall, scheduled games against local clubs and high school teams, and dug out some men’s varsity jerseys from the late ’60s that he passed on to the women. The team received new athletic department-issued uniforms in the fall of 1978, the same season Harvard won the first Ivy League title in soccer.

Perhaps the most dramatic event of the 1970s grew out of the women crew’s frustration with inadequate facilities at Yale. With no separate locker room near the river where the men’s and women’s teams practiced in winter, the women waited in the bus while the men showered and changed in the boathouse, and then rode 30 miles back to New Haven. Convinced the university was ignoring their needs, and unaware of Barnett’s efforts to improve facilities, the entire crew walked into Barnett’s office and stripped off their sweatsuits, revealing the words “Title IX” in Yale blue across their bare chests and backs, as one team member read a statement of grievances.

The “Yale Strip-In,” as it came to be known, produced an improved temporary facility and then, in short course, a permanent boathouse, and it also revealed the more generally elevated expectations of women athletes, at Yale and beyond. While it thus is seen by many as a turning point in women’s athletics on the New Haven campus, there also were many examples of equal treatment between men and women from the beginning, at Yale and elsewhere. Melanie Ginter, a member of the Yale women’s swim team during this time, remembers being sympathetic to the crew protest, but says women swimmers received support, including pool time and facilities, comparable to the men. Likewise, the state-of-the-art Gordon Track built at Harvard in the mid-1970s was made available to both men’s and women’s track teams, which had united quickly for practice and training.

Most women’s teams, however, did face early challenges, which were compounded when they traveled to other schools and intercollegiate competitions. Nancy Kalafus, basketball coach at Barnard starting in 1979, remembers that her players received a per diem food allowance of $15 when traveling; some administrators had the attitude that women “only eat salad,” she says, and didn’t need as much as men. Soon after, when the Columbia-Barnard Consortium was finalized, Kalafus discovered the disparity between support for women’s and men’s teams. On a trip to Cornell, after having to take her players out of a restaurant when they couldn’t afford the $10 meal, she learned the men’s team was fed a steak dinner every night that was paid for by the university. Before long, she had convinced the administration to give her team the same per diem.

Sometimes, when traveling, teams also met challenges returning home — a particular obstacle in 1973-74 when the world energy crisis led to the closing of gas stations on Sundays. Dartmouth’s Kurtz remembers running out of gas on a Saturday night returning with the squash team from the national championships at Yale. Her first thought was that if they didn’t make it, “everyone would blame it on women in general: ‘they can’t handle these crises or plan ahead.’” So she and the players pushed the van up the next hill and coasted down until they reached a phone and could call for help. The team reached home within 20 minutes of their scheduled time. This episode also allowed the women to show their determination in comparison with the men who had the same problem that weekend. As Kurtz recalled years later in the Dartmouth alumni magazine, “the men’s gymnastics team ran out of gas in New York and spent the night in a motel until the stations opened on Monday. The men’s squash team ran out of gas on Route 89, hitchhiked home, and had to go back to get the van on Monday. So much,” she concluded, “for being macho.”

Financial support became critical and fundraising quickly became a necessity for teams, whether by traditional or innovative means. Alumni friends’ groups for women’s sports were established, although prospects were limited because women had only a small pool of alumni to approach, as the women’s programs were so much newer than the men’s. To compensate, parents and friends were solicited for support ranging from funds to buy equipment to accommodations for away competitions. Students also took the initiative, holding bake sales, parking cars at football games, and selling t-shirts. Perhaps the most creative and successful fundraising concept came out of Brown, where the women’s tennis team showed X-rated movies in the swimming pool to raise money for a spring break trip. In all of these ways, women players and their coaches proved themselves adept not only at forming teams, but at developing the infrastructure required to succeed.

The Ivy Game in the National Spotlight

For all of the on-campus changes in the 1970s, Ivy women’s athletics also reflected developments in the larger environment, including the crucial national development regarding women’s sports of the last three decades — the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This federal statute required that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” In addition to defining in legal terms the requirements for equity in sports, Title IX forced institutions to find a way to not just say they supported women’s athletics, but to do what was necessary to implement equity.

Soon after she arrived at Yale in 1976 as assistant athletic director and head basketball coach, Louise O’Neal recalls going “through the whole Title IX checklist” and discovering the school had to address virtually every item, from scheduling to competitions to equipment to coaching: “We went through line item by line item, just to see what kind of services were done for the men, what kind of equipment, what kind of laundry, what kind of event management things were done. . . . Everything needed to be upgraded and improved.” Shepherding that process became one of O’Neal’s primary responsibilities during her years there, before she left to become associate athletic director at Dartmouth in 1979.

Peggy Walbridge, a national champion fencer at Cornell in the 1970s, believes that Title IX “is the only way that women would ever have been given the chance for sports.” Cornell officials, she recalls, said that they did not have the money or space to install a women’s locker room at the busier end of campus, for example. If women wanted to jog in the main gym, she says, “you went to the bathroom, changed clothes, jogged, and then you went back to the bathroom and put your clothes back on.” With Title IX, “Voila, the university found money and used the visiting men’s basketball team locker room for [us].”

Walbridge, now an assistant dean of arts and sciences at Cornell, also points to the value of Title IX as a symbolic statement that sports were acceptable for women and that women athletes were not intellectually inferior to non-athletes. Today, she says, athletic involvement is considered desirable for both men and women college applicants. But when she applied to colleges for admission in 1970 and mentioned that she had played varsity basketball and volleyball, she wondered if admissions officers — most of whom were male — thought, “Hmmm, does she have a brain?” For her, Title IX started making women’s participation in sports a plus rather than a minus, a lesson that gradually has become overwhelmingly clear to young girls across America.

As Title IX was defining the requirements for women’s programs, the intercollegiate governance of those programs soon fell to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). In 1958, champions of women’s intercollegiate athletics had seen sufficient interest in the endeavor that they believed organizations were needed to promote and control its development. In 1972, the groups and subgroups that had resulted came together as the AIAW, with the purpose of fostering women’s intercollegiate athletics consistent with the educational aims and objectives of member schools. AIAW leaders wanted to avoid elements of men’s programs that the women felt were damaging to the true value of sport: athletic scholarships, recruitment, compulsory gate receipts, and an emphasis on winning above all else. The concept proved popular across the country, and during the 1970s institutional membership in the AIAW grew from 206 to 970, a larger number than the membership at the time of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which directed men’s programs.

The AIAW philosophy also was consistent with the balance of academics and athletics in the Ivy League, and as Ivy women’s programs began to grow in this decade, their leaders adopted the AIAW as the governing body for women’s competition. According to Brown’s Gorton, the Ivy League was the first conference to hold membership in the AIAW, and, as will be explored in later chapters, until the demise of the AIAW in 1982, some of the top women’s administrators in Ivy sports also held the top leadership positions in the AIAW.