Ivy League Sports

When runner Suzanne Jones Walmsley transferred to Harvard after her freshman year at a large state university, she discovered an Ivy League environment that was in one sense unchanged from what it had been for centuries: devoted to an educational mission that emphasized both academics and extracurricular activities, including athletics, to develop a well-rounded student. In another sense, however, Walmsley’s years at Harvard in the late 1980s and early 1990s reflected a dramatic demographic change that had occurred across Ivy campuses in the previous quarter-century. Not only had women by the end of this period been fully integrated into the academic life of the institutions, but campuses were at last moving toward equity in athletic programs.

The combination of academics and athletics was what brought Walmsley to the Ivy League, but only recently has she understood how far opportunities for women have come in just 25 years. As a student, she says she took women’s athletics for granted: “It never occurred to me that the [earlier] program wasn’t the way that it was when I was there. We had the same opportunities as the men as far as competition, travel, uniforms, locker rooms, etc., and our participation was valued.” Unlike her predecessors of the ’70s and ’80s, she “never felt like a second-class citizen.”

Walmsley credits her current position as an athletic administrator at Wellesley College for enabling her to meet women from those early years and helping her value that history. Whether it was Pat Henry at Harvard recalling women students making their own skirts for field hockey games or former Yale and Dartmouth administrator and coach Louise O’Neal “having to fight tooth and nail for just an opportunity to be able to compete,” Walmsley says it is through “talking with them and getting a sense of their experiences that you realize how far women’s athletics has come and how lucky we are.”

At the Ivy League’s Silver Anniversary Symposium in April 1999, former Cornell ice hockey star Kim Ratushny agreed with Walmsley, but emphasized the challenges that remain:

With time I’ve been able to appreciate my experiences on kind of a timeline of Title IX and a timeline of the evolution of women’s ice hockey. My time period from 1988 to 1992 was really at the end of Title IX dormancy. From ’72 to ’92 … it had not really evolved. Title IX litigation had not really started and women’s ice hockey was just really exploding. My understanding is that in the seven years since I graduated, there’s been a real turnaround in women’s ice hockey. And I’m really interested in how much things have changed. From all indications, I hear that progress is being made, but I hope that we continue to move forward, and I hope that we are very candid about where we are and what still needs to be done.

Indeed, the Ivy League’s women student-athletes of the 1990s have grown up in far more sophisticated sports environments than did their counterparts of the 1970s, as is true nationally. Women enter college with more extensive prior athletic experience, more intense expectations, and a greater likelihood of specializing in one sport rather than several. The Ivy institutions also have evolved significantly, with each evidencing a strong matured commitment to the scope and support of women’s athletics. Nationally, women’s participation in college athletics increased by almost 30 percent in the 1980s, creating significant competitive and recruiting challenges for the Ivy League, which continued to emphasize high academic standards and to refrain from awarding athletic financial aid.

The decade’s end thus provides the opportunity to not only to reflect on how well Ivy League women’s athletics have responded to these changes, but also to prepare for a future that combines tradition, progress, and continued challenge.

Campus Challenges and Progress

With women’s athletics programs firmly established on each Ivy League campus in the 1990s, concerns regarding the level of support emerged. These concerns were addressed by all parties affected — student-athletes, coaches, administrators, and alumni — and within the mandate of Title IX, League-wide issues, and the culture of each individual institution. The first programs had made history with virtually every step they took; in this decade, at the same time history was still being made, participants also now had a history upon which to draw for precedents and lessons.

The number of women athletes participating in programs continued to increase, as did funding to support such improvements as more assistant coaches and updated equipment. But expansion also occurred when sports were added, often as a result of pressure from students and coaches, whose efforts were backed by evolving Title IX interpretations. Increased expectations meant that any attempt to cut back programs would be met with resistance and, on occasion, legal action.

Certainly the most publicized example involving cutbacks was at Brown, where in 1992, gymnast Amy Cohen and other members of the gymnastics and volleyball teams brought a class action suit against the university after the athletic department, under university-wide budget pressures, changed those two sports, along with men’s water polo and golf, from varsity to club status. While the resolution of the case was protracted and at times bitter, institutional funding was eventually restored to those sports, and three additional sports — women’s lightweight crew, water polo, and equestrian — were elevated to varsity status. The larger impact of the Cohen v. Brown case, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s final action, was a clear judicial acceptance that Title IX compliance would be measured by a “proportionality” standard rather than by previously accepted, but hard-to-measure, assessments of student interest.

Title IX issues also arose at other Ivy institutions during this period, though their resolutions were shorter in length and produced less national impact than at Brown. In the early 1990s, according to associate athletic director Betsy East, the Cornell athletic department’s planning process had gathered data through surveys and focus groups involving alumni, students, faculty, and the community. She and others believed at the time “that we could not continue to run the number of programs that we were running. We were not doing a quality job with all of them. So I truly believed that we needed to be dropping sport programs, although I also believe in participation.”

The attempt to reconcile these competing objectives resulted in Cornell’s decision on a cost-benefit basis to drop programs with the highest per-student expenses, while also trying to affect the fewest number of students. With women’s gymnastics only involving about a dozen students and fencing about half that, the department decided to drop those sports, along with four men’s programs. As a result, however, students filed a lawsuit against the university, which was settled out of court, and gymnastics was reinstated as a varsity sport. “At that time,” East explains, “it was clear that the courts were deciding that you should not be dropping any women’s programs if you were not in total compliance.” Fencing was also reinstated shortly thereafter, and softball was added by the end of the decade.

Administrators like East often felt caught in the middle of this kind of dispute. She remembers feeling very ambivalent about the students’ lawsuit: “When we got sued, there was a part of me that was very upset about that and there was a part of me that was glad. . . . On the one hand, I am very loyal to the institution, and on the other hand, I felt like they really should come up with the money to support this program. It was hard.”

In a situation similar to Cornell’s, Dartmouth director of athletics Dick Jaeger recalls consulting with the Office for Civil Rights in Boston in the early 1990s about the definition and specific requirements of gender equity. “It was clear to us,” he says, “that if you start looking at the Title IX tenets, just in terms of the ratio of men and women athletes to the men and women in the class as a whole, we were off-base and we knew we needed to make some changes.” As a result, Dartmouth added softball and women’s volleyball as fully funded varsity programs because those were the two sports in which the greatest interest and the potential to be competitive existed. The most difficult part, according to Jaeger, was juggling priorities within the department to absorb those new expenses without additional funds for expansion. Increased travel allowances and salary enhancements had to be put on hold, while some facility changes were involved. For instance, the volleyball program was slated to practice and play in Leede Arena — home of Dartmouth’s basketball teams — and the time slots would have to be divided in an equitable manner. But Jaeger says he justified the shift by explaining “our commitment right now is to creating more opportunities for women. . . . It was something that we knew we needed to do.”