Ivy League Sports

The 1980s opened in the Ivy League with women’s athletics programs in place and accepted at every institution. The challenge for the League’s schools was thus no longer to begin individual teams, but to strengthen women’s sports as positive experiences for their student-athletes and to firmly root them in their institutional structures. The story of this decade begins with the expanded number of sports at individual schools, increased levels of support for new and existing women’s programs, and an accelerated emphasis on recruiting. At the League-wide level, the number of championships increased in the decade from ten to 16 sports, while the manner in which those championships were determined was modified. The national framework in which women’s sports were conducted also underwent a dramatic change as governance shifted to the NCAA from the AIAW, which was then disbanded. If it was no longer an entirely new world for Ivy League women’s athletics, it was still an uncertain time that necessitated building and bridging between past and future.

Campus challenges and progress

In this decade, the final member of Ivy League women’s athletics was recognized officially when the Columbia-Barnard consortium was finalized in 1983, the same year that Columbia College began to admit women and women enrolled in all the undergraduate units of Columbia University. With full programs thus operating on all eight Ivy campuses, women’s sports was no longer a new or unusual phenomenon, though questions of implementation and other challenges persisted.

A major issue during the 1980s was how best to administer dual men’s and women’s programs. Although it was new to coeducation, Columbia’s issues were not unlike those being worked out at other Ivy institutions. Paul Fernandes, Columbia’s associate athletic director, recalls that after the consortium was established, Marjorie Greenberg Tversky, the other associate director, initially took the women’s teams and he took the men’s. But that plan lasted only a couple of years because it resulted in so much overlap:

It made more sense to not have Marge to do just the women and me to do just the men, but to combine so that Marge would take care of some women’s teams and some men’s teams, and I would do the same. Then, what we tried to do was to take sports that had teams in both genders and have one person take care of that. Men’s and women’s swimming would go to one person. Men’s and women’s cross-country would go to one individual. . . . [So] when people came into the office to talk about a particular problem that might exist or just to get some information on a program, it was not like, well, if it is a women’s program, you go to the woman, and if it is a men’s program, you go to the man. It was set up so that you go to the individual who is in charge of that particular sport. . . . By doing it that way, a healthy atmosphere was developed.

No matter what the administrative structure, however, continued progress for women’s programs was aided by having someone “at the table” — often a woman administrator — who kept women’s athletics visible and on the agenda for the combined athletic department. At Dartmouth, sports information director Kathy Slattery, who has been in her position since 1983, credits associate athletic director Louise O’Neal for ensuring equitable treatment of women’s sports during this period. O’Neal was “very much a diplomat, she had to be hard-nosed,” Slattery says. “She had a variety of roles here in an effort to ensure in very early stages that women’s athletics would have absolutely every opportunity to grow and establish deep roots.”

This attention translated into increased institutional support for full-time and more-experienced coaches, new assistant coaches, equitable scheduling, and improved access to facilities. Cornell’s Betsy East, who coached gymnastics in the early 1980s, recalls her excitement when her team’s training site was “moved from Helen Newman Hall, which was the women’s gym at the time, where equipment had to be set up and taken down every day for practice, to a permanent home in Teagle Hall, which was on the other side of the campus with the main athletic facilities, where we only had to take down our floor mat every day and put it back.”

Improved support, of course, did not guarantee equity. Barbara Chesler, associate athletic director at Yale, remembers arriving in 1985, going to the equipment manager, and saying, “If we are going to give jock straps out to the men, then we should provide [sports] bras for the women.” When he agreed and they handed out the bras, she was surprised at the positive reaction from around the League. She had not thought the request to be a major point, but it had great symbolic value. Yet Chesler points out that everyone at Yale shared the goal of offering the best and most equitable program possible. Unlike the frequently contentious situations in the 1970s, seeking equity in the 1980s, she says, was more a matter of pointing out the problem and working with others to address it. “It is not,” she emphasizes, “like you point something out and then you have to sit there and fight for it for three years.”

As these programs developed further, athletes and coaches frequently experienced a combination of support and continuing challenges. Tennis player Deborah Goldfine, who graduated from Harvard in 1985, recalls the team’s having to travel as cheaply as possible to tournaments, which meant driving over 300 miles by van to Princeton. Once, she says, the van broke down in a snowstorm, and the team had to sit and wait in the cold while one of the coaches walked back ten miles to the nearest gas station. Sometimes, the team’s efforts to economize had mixed effects. Goldfine tells of one time when they went to Chicago for a tournament and stayed with an alumna, whose family had three dogs and six cats. It was an uncomfortable experience for those, she says, “who did not really like to sleep with dogs and cats, but then there were others of us who missed their animals, so they were excited to be there.”

There were also the beginnings of the traditions and benefits that the men long had enjoyed. Dartmouth field hockey coach Mary Corrigan started a tradition of taking her team on a pre-season trip to Ireland every fourth year. The experience was “often a highlight of the players’ career at Dartmouth,” she recalls, “because not only did they get to play against foreign competition but they got to live in another culture. They were hosted by families in Ireland [and] used to say, ‘Oh my word, the lady that I am staying with! I thought that we would really beat her team because she never trained. She smokes. She has three kids. Yet, when we got out on the field, she just went flying right by.’” It helped the students, says Corrigan, to see that “field hockey did not have to end after college” and they could play as they grew older, perhaps with less youthful energy but with more seasoned intelligence.

Corrigan also felt a symbolic turning point occurred at Dartmouth in 1987 when the first woman player was asked to speak at “Dartmouth Night.” The night, a long-standing tradition on the eve of Homecoming Weekend, includes a huge bonfire and now has one man and one woman sport captain circling the campus green in a convertible, but at that point a woman team captain had never been invited alongside the men. That year, however, athletic director Ted Leland invited field hockey co-captain Kate Perle, who was named Ivy League Player of the Year following the season, to make a speech. “That was a really proud moment for the women athletes at Dartmouth,” Corrigan recalls, “for all women at Dartmouth.”

Sometimes the support was less tangible but just as welcome. Harvard basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith recalls being thrilled that President Derek Bok, who had played basketball at Stanford, came to many of her team’s games, including one key game at which he had his picture taken with the team. Carolyn Campbell-McGovern, now Ivy League senior associate director, remembers the good crowds that came to Dartmouth women’s basketball games when she was there as an assistant athletic director in the late 1980s. Aside from student fans at games, members of the community attended, especially a group of alumni, she says, “who came to every event, men’s or women’s, that Dartmouth had.” Campbell-McGovern also recalls young girls coming to the games, especially those who had attended the coach’s summer basketball camp, to cheer enthusiastically for the team and follow favorite players around in pursuit of autographs.

Yet with many athletic programs competing for a finite number of dollars, responsibility for raising money for special and even some regular activities still often fell to teams themselves. For the Harvard basketball team’s first trip to Europe, coach Delaney-Smith says the players raised funds through such activities as selling clam chowder at the Harvard/Yale football game and getting students’ parents to pay for exam survival kits. Team members assembled those kits with such items as highlighters, brownies, cookies, juice, pens, pencils, and fun items and then delivered them to students, along with a schedule of their games.

Over time, friends’ groups for women’s sports also developed to help with fundraising from alumni. Despite the growth of women’s groups, women’s friends’ groups continued to have a smaller pool from which to recruit support because there were, and are still, many fewer women alumni than men. The solution often has been to combine the men’s and women’s friends groups of like sports (i.e., women’s and men’s ice hockey) into one sport-wide group of supporters.

Finally, women athletes and their coaches began to forge their own traditions that would live on after them, becoming part of the formerly all-male lore and histories of their schools. Whether started by coaches, or arising from players’ own enthusiasm and commitment to their teams, these stories and rites became key parts of the consolidation of women’s sports on Ivy campuses during this period. Brown soccer coach Phil Pincince tells the story of a ritual begun by player Melissa Ching, who came from a very close-knit Hawaiian family. After the family came to a Brown game, they sent Pincince a jar with candy in it and the word “geev’um” on it. Spontaneously, he recalls, before one game Ching told the other players in the huddle to say together “Geev’um Bruno.” Brown soccer players still unite in an enclosed circle and shout that phrase before every game.