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At the University of Pennsylvania, the women coaches were the primary force behind expansion. Women’s soccer had been added earlier in the decade, but in 1995 the women’s coaches of all sports took a strong stand for across-the-board equity following the university’s Title IX self-study. According to Julie Soriero, former Penn women’s basketball coach, the group “really pushed the administration to make some decisions” and to spend the money needed to make the program equitable. When the university resisted, both sides brought in lawyers — the coaches feeling they had to “draw a hard line and say that if things did not change, we would go forward with a lawsuit.” Looking back, Soriero applauds not only those women coaches who took a courageous stand and the men’s coaches who stood with them, but also the administration for agreeing to a settlement, negotiated by former athletics director Fred Shabel, that made “vast improvements for our women athletes.”
At Columbia, former assistant athletics director Merry Ormsby returned as an associate athletics director in 1990, and John Reeves arrived as the new director of athletics the following year. Along with the continuing associate athletics director, Paul Fernandes, they formed a strong commitment to achieving equity and adding to the existing slate of women’s sports. To determine how to proceed, the athletic department conducted an extensive survey of the student population in the summer of 1993 to identify women students’ priorities for additional sports. After an assessment of available facilities, field hockey and lacrosse were added, followed by softball in the spring of 1999, all at the varsity level.
Princeton, likewise, added sports on its own initiative by forming varsity programs in water polo and lightweight crew — sports in which there is not yet League-wide competition. Amy Campbell, Princeton’s former senior associate director of athletics and now the director of athletics at Bryn Mawr College, also points to a “huge growth in facilities,” including an artificial turf field, new stadium, new locker rooms, renovated boathouse and squash courts, and a new pool. These facility improvements, she emphasizes, benefit both the women’s and men’s programs.
Harvard’s program also expanded in the 1990s, based on a three-year plan for women’s sports developed in 1993 that led to higher levels of support for the existing teams in volleyball, ice hockey, and softball and the elevation of golf to the varsity level.
Yale’s changes focused on expenditures, increasing support for all teams and dedicating substantial funds to infrastructure improvements, including a $100 million, three-phase renovation project of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, designed to improve the facility for all women’s and men’s intercollegiate teams in addition to the larger campus community.
The issue of men coaching women’s sports became more visible in the Ivy League
as in the rest of the country during the 1990s. Perspectives on the issue cover
a wide range of experiences and opinions. Columbia’s Jay Butler, for example,
who currently is the only male coach of women’s basketball in the Ivy League,
first became interested in coaching girls while working at high school and college
summer camps. There, he says he was impressed with the girls’ eagerness to learn
and work on their skills, whereas he felt the boys and even the boys’ coaches
were more concerned with winning than with learning. Butler, who spent years as
an assistant coach of women’s basketball at Brown before returning to the League
as the head coach at Columbia in 1994, has coached women for his entire collegiate
career. He admits to agreeing with critics of male coaches who have moved recently
from men’s to women’s teams because the current emphasis on women’s sports makes
those jobs more financially rewarding than in previous years, rather than because
“they knew how to coach women and got an enjoyment out of coaching women.”
Bob Rothenberg, head coach of both men’s and women’s track and field at Brown, believes that coaches have personal styles that make them naturally better at coaching either women or men, but that few are equally good at both. Although he admits there are exceptions among both players and coaches, he thinks that “feelings and the emotional part of the experience” of sport are more important to women than to men. He also points out the difficulty women coaches often face when they compete for jobs with men, who tend to have more experience because they have been in the profession longer. An athletic department seeking “the best” coach may equate “best” with “most experienced” and therefore give precedence to the men.
Just as new issues developed in the 1990s, some earlier ones largely were resolved. Not only had it become accepted that women’s teams were to receive support for uniforms and equipment equal to the men’s, but cooperative efforts achieved improvements for both programs. At mid-decade, for instance, Yale hired two new soccer coaches, one for the women’s team and one for the men’s. According to associate athletic director Barbara Chesler, “Instead of having just the men’s soccer team go out and work a deal [with a shoe and apparel manufacturer], they went together and worked a deal for both, that they would both be sponsored by Fila. Those are things,” she says, “that we did not have in 1985.”
Equity in access to facilities also is largely in place, though issues may still arise occasionally when practice areas are shared, in view of the ever-growing demands of both women’s and men’s programs. As in previous decades, sometimes creativity and persistence have been required to gain equal access for women’s teams. Shawn Ladda, who coached women’s soccer at Columbia from 1988 to 1994, recalls that while the Columbia men’s soccer team played and practiced on Baker Field, the women had to practice on the outfield of the baseball field. Ladda started out by scheduling practices for the women at night, but then worked out a schedule with associate athletics director Paul Fernandes that allowed equal game and practice times for the women’s squad.
A major boost for program expansion at many individual schools began to occur
in the 1990s from the increased financial support of alumni, partly due to the
larger numbers of women alumnae, especially former student-athletes, and partly
as male alumni have grown more and more likely to donate funds for women’s programs
and facilities. The Columbia football alumni, for instance, contributed three-quarters
of the money to install artificial turf on the football field, so that the women’s
field hockey and lacrosse teams could also use the facility. And wrestler Arno Niemand, Cornell ’56, was the key donor for his
alma mater’s new softball field, which was dedicated in 1998.
In 1994, the League office initiated a program to help provide or upgrade team championship trophies for women’s sports. Sculptor Timothy Maslyn was hired to create a women’s fencing trophy with monies donated by the University of Pennsylvania in honor of longtime coach Lajos S. Csiszar. Maslyn used Penn’s Mary Jane O’Neill, NCAA individual champion in 1984, as the subject for the piece. Since then, Maslyn has produced the Johnson-Crowley Ivy League Softball Trophy (Penn/Princeton donors), the Cheryl and Richard Gouse Ivy League Women’s Tennis Trophy (Brown), and the Sally P. Shoemaker Ivy League Women’s Rowing Trophy (Penn). Commitments already are in place for similar trophies in golf, volleyball, basketball, cross country, and swimming.
Donations also have contributed to institutional growth and stability for women’s athletic programs. At Brown, two alumni — Malcolm and Liz Chase — endowed the women’s basketball head coach position in the name of the 1997-98 basketball captain, Liz Turner. These types of endowments, beginning to grow in Ivy women’s sports, are particularly notable for they ensure the continuity of programs into the future.
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