Ivy League Sports

The Players

Though the building process had begun in the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that Ivy League athletics for women really acquired the definition it has today. From simply starting programs, Ivy institutions began to focus clearly on the goal of providing the greatest benefit to individuals and the school community as a whole. Coaches, facilities, uniforms, and other resources were means to an end: an environment in which women student-athletes would thrive.

Princeton’s former senior associate director of athletics, Amy Campbell, who became director of athletics at Bryn Mawr College in July 1999, remembers being impressed with the philosophy of the program when she arrived at Princeton in 1988 to become an assistant director of athletics:

The philosophy is that the experience of every student-athlete is important. If there are two athletes sitting having lunch, and it is a soccer player that is male and a squash player that is female, or a football player and a women’s tennis player … fundamentally their experience ought to be the same. . . . Whether someone starts or gets more playing time will depend upon their skill level, but in terms of what the experience is like for that kid, what their competition is like, how they travel, the level of coaching they get, the locker advantages, the facility advantages — that ought to be the same, no matter what the sport.

As with men’s traditions, the developing focus of Ivy League women’s athletics was to be part of the best possible educational environment in which students can learn, whether in the classroom or on the playing field. Campbell goes on to identify the ability to think and articulate what they’re thinking as one important life skill that student-athletes take with them from Princeton. Second, she says is “how to get along”: “[students] talk a lot about teammates, friendship, but more than that it is how, as a group of people, you work together to be better than one person to achieve a goal. One person [alone] can go [from A] to B; the team [as a whole] can go to Z. That comes through team sport. If it is an individual sport, it is how do they use their teammates to better their performance.” Finally, she says, they gain “the ability after defeat, after not getting what you want, to come back and to work to get what you want, to win.”

Kathryn Yatrakis, associate dean of Columbia College, agrees, noting that athletes learn how to set goals and then reach those goals with discipline and teamwork. She also agrees that learning from losing provides key life lessons: “No matter how good you are as an athlete, you [can] fail. . . . failure is important because you fail and then you pick yourself up again and go forward.” Yatrakis also points to the benefits that athletic programs provide to the university, especially in building a “sense of community in ways that some of our other events are not able to, no matter how good the concert or how extraordinary the debaters or how wonderful the volunteer fair. At an athletic event where a team is competitive and where a team is vying for a League title, you will see administrators there, you will see faculty, you will see students, you will see families, and it is really a way of drawing a community together.”

The greater prominence of women athletes in the 1980s also created the realization that they were part of a continuing historical movement that had begun long before them. Twin sisters Betsy and Mary McCagg, who graduated from Harvard in 1989, were outstanding rowers who were part of the 1995 world championship and 1992 and 1996 U.S. Olympic teams. The sisters were not only making school history and women’s history with their efforts; they were following a family tradition. Mary McCagg remembers arriving at the Weld Boathouse in the fall of 1985 and being watched over by their grandfather “peering at us from his 1922 team photo that sat right behind the rowing machines in the erg-room.” She and her sister were “bringing a new twist to this game. We were to be oarswomen, not oarsmen.” Contributing to the growing tradition of women’s athletics was important to them as “part of a movement larger than ourselves.”

Yet it was the practical experience of being part of a team that had the greatest effect. Betsy McCagg says it was her four years of rowing that gave her the confidence and drive for success that still guide me to this day. As I entered the boathouse on my first day of school, I was a nervous freshman, knowing that I wanted to row, but not much more. From that moment I was transformed from an anonymous student into a Radcliffe Rower. In that huge stone boathouse I found friendly faces to sit with in the dining hall and knowledgeable upperclassmen to guide me through the phone book-size course catalogue. I learned from them what it means to commit to a team and consequently to achieve goals far beyond those that I could imagine by myself.

Today, coach Liz O’Leary admires the McCagg sisters not only for their remarkable careers, but for continuing to give back to their program, as both live in the Cambridge area. “They train out of the boat house,” O’Leary says, “they give us moral support, they help people with their technique in the weight room. They have a big impact and are tremendous role models for the undergraduate athletes.”

Another athlete who went on to postgraduate accomplishment was Ula Lysniak, a 1987 graduate of Barnard College, who played basketball for the Columbia-Barnard Consortium. Lysniak was Columbia’s first 1,000-point scorer and still holds the institution’s top spot in scoring and rebounding. Yet, like most Ivy athletes, she wanted to attend a college where she could excel in both academics and athletics. She chose the Ivy League because it offered, in her words, “Division I basketball” and “Division I academics.” After graduation, Lysniak considered many options, including corporate jobs and graduate school, but ultimately decided to accept a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the University of Salzburg, where she stayed for two years and was also recruited to play on the professional women’s team there. Currently finishing her doctorate in movement sciences, she is an instructor and head women’s coach for John Jay College in Manhattan.

While Ivy women student-athletes from all eras have had notable professions after graduation, one of the most publicly recognizable careers emerged during the 1980s. Jessica Yu, who graduated from Yale in 1987 as a GTE/CoSIDA Academic All-American, was an All-Ivy fencer who contributed to a pair of team NCAA titles. She subsequently pursued a career as an independent film producer and won an Academy Award in 1997 in the documentary short subject category for her work, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien.