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The Players
At the heart of this changing environment — from coeducation to federal regulations, from tentative institutional goals to expanded athletic programs — were the women student-athletes themselves. And if there was sometimes hesitation or resistance within other parts of that environment, there was little sign of it on the part of these young women. Not only were they often the instigators of programs, but many exhibited an awareness of the historical importance of their actions. Harvard’s Bob Scalise recalls that even the women on his first club soccer team in 1976 were extremely committed, never missing practices or games: “They felt that they were doing something, not only for themselves and playing on a team, but I think they felt they were doing something for women’s athletics [and] the sport of soccer.”
This dedication was particularly noteworthy because many athletes in the 1970s played more than one sport, in contrast to the concentration in a single sport that is more typical today. Sandy Helve at Dartmouth and Emily Goodfellow at Princeton, for example, became the first women to earn a varsity letter in each season of every year in a four-year career.
Many players at the time were walk-ons: they had not been recruited out of high school, but simply showed up for practice or came to organizational meetings, often accompanying a classmate or in response to an announcement posted on campus. Participants ranged from those who had played in high school and frequently initiated the college-level activities, to those who had only played informally with parents or siblings in their backyards and had never been on a team, or in a formal game, in their lives.
David Micahnik recalls recruiting students from physical education classes at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 when he was asked to form a women’s fencing program. He put up signs with catchy slogans like “Penn is mightier with the sword” and advertised in the student newspaper. Some of those who signed up had fenced before, but most played other sports, like field hockey and lacrosse, and wanted to fill in the school year with a winter activity. Within three years, however, Micahnik had developed the program, including recruiting experienced fencers like Margaret Szabunic and Anne Kayler, to the point where the team surged to sixth in the national competition and had its first All-American in Szabunic. That 1976 team was also exceptional for its commitment and courage. One member, Diane Smith, had come back to participate in the national championship after leaving the previous year with an injured thumb, only because a fourth fencer was desperately needed. Another, Penny Reed, a right-hander, had jammed the joint in her right thumb and had to learn quickly how to fence with her left.
Especially considering the challenges they faced, the successes achieved by Ivy
women athletes during the 1970s are remarkable. Among many who achieved individual
excellence in athletics and academics were Tina Steck of Barnard, the Ivy three-meter
diving champion in 1977 and 1979 who still holds the record number of points at
the Ivy championships,
and Cornell’s Walbridge, an All-American who won the National Intercollegiate
Women’s Fencing Association (NIWFA) championship in 1974. In addition, seven of the 13 first women to receive Rhodes Scholarships
in December 1976, selected on the basis of intellectual achievements, character,
leadership, and physical vigor, had attended Ivy League schools: Laura Garwin,
Allison Muscatine, and Denise Thal of Radcliffe; Diane Coutu, Sarah Deutsch, and
Sue Halpern of Yale; and Suzanne Perles of Princeton and Harvard Business School. Muscatine, Thal, and
Perles all participated in intercollegiate athletics; the former two in basketball
and tennis, and the latter in field hockey.
Development and Success as a League
Aside from the efforts they made to create and improve programs, and in addition to the honors they earned, these young women were also in the process of defining what it meant to be a female student-athlete in the Ivy League. As Brown softball co-captain Tracy Barnett explained in 1977, prior to the Rhode Island State Tournament:
We cannot emphasize enough that the concern of women’s sports at Brown goes far beyond winning, statistics, skill,
and strategy. In the long run, statistics [are] forgotten, and it is the qualities we have gained within which remain.
Learning how to win and how to lose, developing a sense of both team and individual pride, and discovering that you
yourself can make a difference add up to valuable personal growth.
Such instances of personal growth were mirrored in institutional growth, as the
traditional objectives of Ivy League schools evolved to serve this new environment.
Although operating, as they always have, without athletic scholarships, Ivy schools
were appreciating more and more the value of sports in producing well-rounded
graduates, women as well as men. Thus, offering strong athletic programs became
a plus for attracting top students. For schools that began to admit women during
this period, the challenge became how to apply the same standards when evaluating
athletics in high school girls’ background as in boys’. According to Fred Jewett, dean of admissions at Harvard in the 1970s,
the Radcliffe admissions process had given little if any weight to athletics in
its consideration of applicants’ extracurricular activities. After admissions
for Harvard and Radcliffe were combined, athletics received more attention as
a part of what prospective students had to offer.
Indeed, the Ivy League itself was evolving in this decade. As women’s school-based competitions moved from intramural to intercollegiate models, the League began to play a more active role in coordinating competition and championships.
Leading this League-wide effort was Arlene Gorton, who saw the need to institutionalize the informal network that had naturally emerged among the top Ivy women’s athletics administrators. In April 1973, with the support of Brown athletic director Andy Geiger, Gorton invited these women to a meeting to run concurrently with that year’s gathering of the eight male Ivy directors of athletics, in May, at the Goat Island resort in Newport, R.I. The women met in Providence on Friday and then joined the men for lunch in Newport on Saturday. The women’s agenda included such items as the financing and staffing of intramural programs, schools’ criteria for club sports, policies on intercollegiate competition, Title IX and its ramifications, and the Ivy League’s relationship with the AIAW, especially considering the two groups’ parallel issues. It was with that pivotal meeting that formal Ivy League governance of women’s athletics began.
The first women’s sport to have an Ivy championship was rowing, won in 1974 by the Radcliffe crew. The rapid growth of Ivy women’s sports was illustrated just five years later when Ivy field hockey honored its first champion, becoming the tenth sport to have an official Ivy League titleist. The other eight, in chronological order of their first championships, were basketball, ice hockey, gymnastics, swimming and diving, outdoor track and field, cross-country, volleyball, and soccer.
As with individual school programs, however, the earliest Ivy championships were constrained by tight budgets and long distances between schools. As a result, they were held as single-day or weekend affairs until 1982-83. Operating under such a compressed schedule meant that basketball and ice hockey teams might play as many as five games in one day, battling every other school present at the competition. The team with the best record at the end of the day became the champion. Constance Van Housen, Penn’s basketball coach and assistant director of women’s athletics in the mid-1970s, recalls that League championships for basketball and swimming were combined into one four-day weekend, and the coaches drove the two teams to the championships together in vans.
Strong rivalries developed almost immediately in these early championship years. Perhaps the fiercest in the 1970s was in ice hockey between Brown and Cornell. Beginning in 1976, that championship was decided in the season-ending Ivy tournament, in which teams played several games in a single day. Cornell won the first five titles, beating a Brown program that had been the first intercollegiate team in the sport. The two schools shared the sixth title after the 1981 championship game was declared a tie after the fourth overtime period. That game, more than any other event, convinced Ivy League administrators to modify the championship formats for women’s sports, bringing them in line with the long-standing practice for men’s athletics.
As the 1970s drew to a close, students, institutions, and the League could point with pride to how far they had progressed. In just a few revolutionary years, a new venture known as Ivy League women’s athletics had been born, with full complements of teams representing all eight schools, and championships in ten sports. The foundation had been laid, programs had been implemented and expanded, and now the next generation of Ivy women athletes would be responsible for keeping the dreams and expectations of so many pioneers alive.
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