Ivy League Sports

Development and Success as a League

In its second decade of women’s athletics, the Ivy League continued to develop a structure to support each school’s programs and manage intercollegiate competitions, while at the same time evolving a distinctive identity of what it meant to be a female Ivy student-athlete. The call for success came from the top, the Council of Ivy Group Presidents. In 1979 on the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Ivy League, the Council issued a set of ten governing principles, the second of which stated, “The member schools [of the Ivy League] are committed to equal opportunities in athletics for men and women.”

The definition of Ivy women’s athletics nearly always returns to the commitment to balance academics and athletics. Kathryn Yatrakis of Columbia says that what distinguishes Ivy athletes is that they are students first and athletes second. This “does not mean,” she says, “that they do not spend an inordinate amount of time on their sport, but it does mean that in the end they are students first. When there is a conflict between their athletic activity and their academic work, we try to see if there is any way to avoid conflicts. For example, we do not schedule athletes for classes on late Friday afternoon. But if there is a conflict, the principle is that the academic work comes first.”

This commitment on the part of Ivy administrators is mirrored by the coaches. Cornell’s former head coach of women’s crew John Dunn says the nature of the League’s programs is exemplified by stories centering around “each athlete trying to be the best rower AND the best student that they can be. Rushing to get on the water because a lab ran late (after 4:30 p.m.) and someone else needing to make it back on campus for a 7:00 p.m. prelim test. Being in a hotel [on the road] and having a 9:00 p.m. boat meeting and having people then go to study before going to bed — before races the next morning.” In fact, most coaches have made the decision to work in the Ivy League because they view athletics and academics as complementary, not competitive, efforts and value the opportunity to coach athletes who are students first.

The story Peter Farrell, women’s track and field and cross country coach at Princeton, tells to exemplify the Ivy athlete is that of “Monica Egbuonu ’84 taking a calculus final in my car on the way to Newark Airport to travel to nationals. She got an ‘A’ on the final and earned All-American honors.”

Perhaps a symbolic confirmation of the “arrival” of Ivy women athletes is when they, like the men, have had to prove to non-Ivy competitors that they were excellent athletes as well as excellent students — a challenge the athletes often use for motivation. Maura Costin-Scalise tells a story from the 1980s when she was head coach of the Harvard women’s swimming and diving team that was in Indianapolis at the NCAAs. She and her team were coming back from a warm-up session and were riding up on an elevator when several members of a team from a Southeastern Conference (SEC) university piled in with them. The SEC women, not realizing the identity of her team, said to Scalise:

“Oh, did you see who’s here? Harvard’s here.” I looked around at the girls and not one of them said anything. Their eyes froze on me ... I said, “Isn’t that nice? What do you think about that?” They said, “Well, we have an awful lot of homework to get done so maybe they can help us do it or maybe they will do it for us.” Then one of their other people said, “Yeah, they are certainly not here to swim. We have never heard about swimming at Harvard.” They luckily walked out of the elevator ahead of us because our girls had on big Harvard stadium jackets with Harvard printed on the back. They walked out of the elevator and we went up to the floor and it was absolutely silent. I turned around and looked at the girls with one of my looks of “so what did you think about that?” They just said, “We are going to kick their ass.” The next day, we got into the pool and sure enough … [our relay team was] right next to those people. . . . We swam and we beat them. The Harvard team swam against that SEC team again in the finals — and beat them again.

The effect of athletic talent in the admissions process in Ivy League schools also evolved as women’s athletics grew. Though all applicants must meet the same admission standards, Ivy admissions offices began in the 1980s to view past athletic involvement, or the possibility of future athletic participation, as pluses for women applicants, as they do for other extracurricular activities. All Ivy institutions, in addition, began to involve their athletic departments in the admissions process by letting coaches express preferences for certain applicants based on athletic talent. As with men’s athletics, admission of women in the 1990s now includes substantial off-campus recruiting.

Columbia’s senior associate dean of admissions Diane McKoy — herself a student and basketball player at Yale in its early years of coeducation — emphasizes the goal of the admissions office in “building a community at Columbia” as one “that contains a lot of different things and a lot of different people. . . . What we hope to do is to give the coaches in the athletic department the kinds of student-athletes that we think they deserve,” she says, “as well as those student-athletes that we think can survive and do well at Columbia.” This principle, which exists for all extracurricular activities from newspaper writing to music to sports, means that her office helps the athletic department “find people that will go out and compete favorably as well as be good students in the classroom. . . . What we attempt to do is to communicate with coaches and get a set goal as to the kinds of things we are both looking for and what their needs are and try to come to some consensus on it.”

Margit Dahl, the director of undergraduate admissions at Yale, agrees. She could be speaking for all Ivy schools in saying that those who apply are “students who are very clear that they want to be students first and athletes second.” She also stresses that even though students apply to places like Yale because they know both the academic and athletic programs are strong, she can reassure them that the athletes are not simply being admitted because they are athletes. The cost of an Ivy League education is not insignificant for student-athletes and their families, and the League does not award athletic scholarships. Yet the many students who receive need-based financial aid know that the aid will not be rescinded and that they do not risk losing the means to pay for their education if they endure a career-ending injury or if they choose to try other aspects of college life rather than to continue to compete in athletics.

Coaches also find the nonscholarship environment preferable. Princeton’s Peter Farrell says that when he first arrived, “I did not know how I could possibly survive in Division I without athletic scholarships. Now I want nothing to do with them. Haggling over money based on the relative merits of athletic performances has almost become distasteful. I would not want to trade places with my scholarship counterparts.” Instead, Farrell values his students as complete people: “Athletes that I deal with do it because they need an outlet or they flat out love the sport. I’ve stayed because I deal with the best and the brightest — truly remarkable women.”

Underpinning the rapid developments of the 1980s was the common goal and cooperative spirit that existed among the League’s coaches and women administrators, many of whom had worked together for a long time — and still are together today in the late 1990s. Betty Costanza, who has coached women’s cross country and track and field at the University of Pennsylvania for 22 years, emphasizes that the coaches “have been here for years and they have a strong bond among themselves as coaches. . . . Each coach is academically oriented and wants to help all athletes balance their lives equally well in athletics and academics. These quality coaches are a pleasure to be around and identify with.”

Coaches, in turn, often credit the Ivy League structure with supporting and taking the lead in building women’s programs. Cornell’s East says she feels “in many ways the Ivy League was ahead of the rest of the country in terms of opportunities for women. We had many more sports for women,” and over time those sports were also supported with coaches and other funding priorities. East also points out the importance of having “a number of leaders in the League who were very supportive of women’s athletics. . . . When we had League meetings, the ADs [athletic directors] and the senior associate women were at the table, whereas at other conferences around the country, that was not happening. Just the fact that we were at the table made the discussion different than if we had not been at the table.” She praises executive director Jeff Orleans, as well, for being “supportive of women’s athletics” and for encouraging the League to adhere to and go beyond NCAA rules and regulations regarding Title IX and gender equity.

Orleans, who has held his position since 1984, says, “We work hard in the Ivy League at bringing all schools and all sports together. Full support for women’s sports and full governance participation by women are essential elements of that approach.” Orleans notes that one or more senior women at each school, like East, served a long term in the 1980s to the 1990s and that their continuity together both helped them to create and nurture common goals and gave them credibility with athletic directors at their own and other Ivy schools. Their involvement would reach another level in 1994, when Pennsylvania senior associate athletic director Carolyn Schlie Femovich was appointed to the Ivy Policy Committee as the inaugural senior woman’s administrator representative.

Increases in individual institutional resources and strengthened League administration, were reflected in the addition of new Ivy League championships and a changed structure of championship competition. By the end of the 1970s, League championships had been conducted in ten sports: basketball, cross country, field hockey, gymnastics, ice hockey, outdoor track and field, rowing, soccer, swimming and diving, and volleyball. To those were added lacrosse, softball, and tennis in 1980, indoor track and field in 1981, fencing in 1982, and squash in 1983. With these efforts, by 1984 the Ivy League was sponsoring more sports, played by more women, than any other conference in the country — a distinction it has held ever since.

There also were positive changes in the manner in which championships in some sports were conducted. During the 1970s, the standard was to have “one-event” championships, determined in single-day or weekend round-robin competitions among all League schools with appropriate-level programs, in which teams competed in multiple contests in basketball, ice hockey, soccer, and volleyball. The team that emerged victorious at the end of the day or weekend was named the champion. Contrary to the founding tenets of the League, this system had nonetheless kept costs down by minimizing travel and had provided every team with an equal chance at winning the title in the same competition. By the early 1980s, the women’s championship structure was modified to follow the practice long used by the men, employing season-long round-robin play in many sports, thus bringing all teams to all campuses on a regular basis. During the 1982-83 season, the soccer, basketball, and ice hockey championships were changed from tournament play to a full round-robin schedule (double round-robin for basketball and ice hockey).

A key event in this changeover was the ice hockey championship in 1981, which ended after regulation play in a tie between Brown and Cornell after those two teams had played other games throughout the day to reach the championship game. That game then went on through four overtimes with the two teams tied 4-4 until a tie was declared. While the Ivy League ice hockey tournament continued for several years, its sole remaining function was to provide the winner with an automatic bid to the ECAC tournament. From 1983 hence, the Ivy League title has been awarded based on a double round-robin format.

Significant school dynasties and rivalries developed in the 1980s. Among the dynasties were Brown in soccer, winning the Ivy title every year of the decade except 1981 and advancing to the NCAA tournament on five occasions; Princeton in softball, winning the Ivy title from 1983 to 1989; Dartmouth in basketball, winning Ivy crowns every year of the decade except 1984 and, in 1983, advancing to the NCAA championship in the first appearance for an Ivy team; Harvard in lacrosse, winning eight Ivy titles during the 1980s and becoming NCAA national champion in 1990; Harvard in tennis, winning eight straight League titles from 1983 to 1990; Pennsylvania in track and field, winning nine of ten Ivy titles from 1984 to 1988 — five indoor and four outdoor; and Princeton in volleyball, winning six of ten Ivy championships in the decade, including a 1987 championship match with Penn that lasted nearly four hours.

Rivalries between schools were also flourishing. Harvard and Yale battled for cross country Ivy championships during the decade, with Harvard winning from 1981 to 1985 and Yale following from 1986 to 1989. Ivy fencing was highlighted by rivalries among Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale. Penn won six consecutive Ivy fencing crowns from 1983 to 1988, but Yale won more national titles in the decade (two to one), and Columbia closed out the decade with its first Ivy title in 1989. Fencers from all three schools alternated in taking individual crowns. In gymnastics, Cornell and Yale battled for the Ivy title throughout the decade, and Yale emerged with seven of the ten championships.

As the sports seasons of the 1980s ended, Ivy women athletes were enjoying more support, greater acceptance, and increased respect for their accomplishments than had their predecessors a decade ago. They had arrived on campus with better preparation, expecting more competitive intercollegiate athletic programs that went beyond “the basics.” And, having benefited from the experiences of their predecessors, they used their expanded resources and opportunities to set new standards for those who would follow.