Ivy League Sports

The Ivy Game in the National Spotlight

Ivy League teams have achieved significant honors at the national level in the 1990s, including five of their eight all-time NCAA championships. Harvard began the decade with a flourish, winning the women’s lacrosse championship in 1990 at Princeton’s Palmer Stadium with a thrilling come-from-behind, 8-7 victory over the University of Maryland. The Crimson had reached the national finals after extending its undefeated Ivy League winning streak to a record 21, going back to 1986. The 1990 national title was the first NCAA women’s lacrosse championship won by an Ivy school and was the first team, as opposed to individual, NCAA title in any sport won by an Ivy women’s program.

Four years later, Princeton also won an NCAA championship in lacrosse, defeating the University of Maryland in the final round. Princeton had entered that game with memories of its close loss to the University of Virginia in the championship round the year before, but emerged victorious in the 1994 match-up in College Park. The victory was Princeton’s first women’s national lacrosse title and the school’s first NCAA team championship. Head coach Chris Sailer, a 1981 Harvard graduate, was named the Division I Coach of the Year for an unparalleled second straight year. The 1994 national title was also notable for being the first and still the only time in Division I that a women’s and men’s team from the same school both won the national championship in the same sport in the same year.

The Ivy League was well represented at the first NCAA championship in the sport of women’s rowing in 1997. At the inaugural event, held on Lake Natoma in Sacramento, California, Princeton and Brown finished second and third, respectively, in overall team totals, and Dartmouth, Radcliffe, and Yale also participated. The first chair of the NCAA Women’s Rowing Committee was Yale associate athletics director Barbara Chesler, who considers being part of the event one of the top experiences of her career:

“When they played the national anthem at that inaugural NCAA crew championship, I had an extraordinary feeling inside of me. I felt like things had really come a long way in my tenure in college athletics.” Two years later, Chesler, as committee chair, presented the national championship trophy to Brown: the Bears’ 1999 victory was Brown’s first NCAA championship in any sport, men’s or women’s, and marked the eighth NCAA women’s team title for an Ivy League institution.

At the national level, the NCAA expanded national championships in the 1990s in volleyball, softball, lacrosse, and soccer, enabling the Ivy League champion to compete against leading teams from other leagues. Many Ivy coaches and administrators are involved in NCAA governance, thus helping direct and promote this national progress. League representatives who have chaired NCAA committees affecting women’s athletics include Amy Campbell, Princeton, women’s lacrosse; Cindy Cohen, Princeton, softball; Colleen Lim, Yale, field hockey; Merry Ormsby, Columbia, men’s and women’s fencing; Carolyn Schlie Femovich, Penn, Division I Basketball Marketing Committee; and Carolyn Campbell-McGovern, Ivy League office, NCAA Olympic Sports Liaison Committee.

Finally, the exploding prominence of women’s sports in all areas was matched in the Ivy League with greatly expanded coverage in school, local, regional, and national media. John Veneziano, assistant athletic director for media relations at Harvard, says that while television coverage has increased, the best example of greater media exposure is newspapers. The Boston Globe, for example, has recently “gone out of its way to cover more women’s athletic events,” he says. Although both newspaper and television have always been receptive to exciting feature stories, now regular event coverage is also included: “The Globe,” Veneziano points out, “has staffed regular season women’s soccer games, women’s basketball games, women’s ice hockey games. . . . That is something that when I came here nine years ago just did not happen."

He credits both greater interest in women’s sports and the excitement of winning teams, especially in basketball and soccer, as factors increasing media interest, and says the coverage also is satisfying for coaches, players, and alumni. Now, the challenge is to attract national media attention on a more regular basis. One step toward that goal at the League level occurred in the 1998-99 season when two women’s basketball games were shown nationwide on DirectTV as part of the Ivy League’s first national basketball television package; additional women’s telecasts will be part of the 1999-2000 Ivy League DirectTV series.

The Players

With two decades of experience upon which to draw, the definition of what makes Ivy League sports unique was further developed in this decade. Columbia’s director of athletics, John Reeves, views the benefits of the intercollegiate athletic program as comparable to that of the academic program. “The only difference,” he says, “is that we affect the reasoning and creative ability of our young people through the medium of movement rather than the traditional classroom activities. Our students … attest to the fact that they not only participate in sports and achieve the social, emotional, and physical benefits, but they also achieve intellectual benefits.” This commitment is articulated in Columbia/Barnard’s mission statement for intercollegiate athletics, which states that its purpose is “to provide educational experiences for our students in the area of sports.” This priority, Reeves explains, means that sports “is not meant for public or entertainment purposes. The welfare of the student-athletes is paramount. We judge our success and failure based upon our competitive success or failure within the Ivy League.”

Yale director of athletics Tom Beckett agrees with that priority and points out that while there is great respect for the Ivy League from those outside the conference, there is also a fair amount of envy. Considering the high academic standards and lack of athletic scholarships, he says, people at other institutions think wouldn’t it be terrific if this could happen on my campus? That we have graduation rates in the 90+ percentage range, that 80 percent of our graduates go on to professional schools, and that we are nationally competitive in probably a dozen sports or more. If you look at conferences across the country, that is pretty unique.

While the institutions create the environment supporting that unique balance, it is the students themselves who will accept no less for themselves. Former Yale women’s basketball coach Cecelia DeMarco characterizes Ivy students as those who do everything with great pride, and athletics is no different — whether it be with their trying to do something academically or when they walk into a gymnasium. They do not like to fail at anything. They are not going to do much [just] for the heck of it. And they are certainly not going to be put into an arena where people can view them without giving it everything that they have. I have come to respect what they are willing to give. . . They are not tied up with scholarships; they do not have to be here. They can leave at anytime, yet they choose to play. That is pretty remarkable.

Even as competition heightened nationally in the 1990s, and scholarship offers continued to expand, All-Americans, national player of the year finalists, and individual and national champions continued to be part of Ivy League women’s athletics.

An accelerating trend among individual athletes reached its culmination in this period with nearly all athletes choosing to specialize in one sport rather than participating in other sports at different times of the year. Yet even as Ivy women continued to demonstrate great commitment and success in sport, they also sought opportunities to give back to their communities. Among the many community service projects across the League during the 1990s is Yale’s program — winner of the 1997 community service award from Athletics Management magazine — in which women and men athletes spend time with and become role models for young girls and boys in New Haven. Beckett praises this program for giving the women athletes a connection with the city and making a difference in a youngster’s life, while instilling in the children the idea that combining athletics and academics can “open up doors … it can change the way you think about yourself, and it can change the way people think about you.” All eight Ivy institutions share this fundamental belief, and by the end of the decade, community service action by Ivy athletes was more the norm than the exception.

Finally, a notable development of this decade is the expanded opportunities that now exist for postgraduate athletic involvement. More and more, women student-athletes have sports-related career options to pursue after graduation. Foremost among these options is coaching. Currently, 15 coaches of League women’s teams are Ivy alumnae, and over the past three decades, 29 Ivy female graduates have come back to coach women’s athletics at one of the eight League institutions. Moreover, coaching careers for Ivy women have become more acceptable since the advent of Ivy League women’s competition, and opportunities have increased. Whereas only five female Ivy graduates during the 1970s later became head coaches of women’s teams in the League, 17 graduates from the 1980s assumed women’s head coaching positions at Ivy League schools — plus one of a men’s sport — and the number for 1990s alumnae is expected to be even higher.

Opportunities to play professionally in some sports also have expanded greatly. Several Ivy basketball greats played with European teams in the 1970s and 1980s. But with the renewed opportunity for women’s professional basketball in the United States, League star Allison Feaster was able to continue her string of successes begun at Harvard into the Women’s National Basketball Association when she was drafted in the first round (fifth overall) by the Los Angeles Sparks. In addition, 42 Ivy League women participated in the Olympics during the decade, with 15 winning medals.

In the end, whether or not Ivy women athletes continue in organized sport in some manner after college does not change the underlying life principles they gain from their experience. Harvard head swimming coach Stephanie Wriede, a 1992 graduate of the school, explains some of the values learned in the Ivy athletic environment:

Women in the Ivy League compete because they want to. They are intelligent, talented women who wish to excel in athletics and in the classroom. Ivy League athletics not only promotes good sportsmanship, but also instills a sense of independence and develops decision making skills in these young women. But I think, most importantly, Ivy League athletics creates female leaders.