Ivy League Sports

League Development and Success

With formal Ivy League women’s sports in its third decade, there is now an impressive collection of evidence demonstrating the value of the special combination of athletics and scholarship found in this league. There are also now more and more coaches, student-athletes, and administrators available to explain the meaning of that combination and articulate its value for each individual. Kathryn Yatrakis, for example, who is associate dean of Columbia College, sees a combination of benefits that student-athletes gain, including discipline, teamwork, and how to set and reach goals:

These are all lessons that serve them in good stead certainly in the classroom. . . . You cannot just go out and run one day and expect to be fit for your team, so you cannot expect to study hard one night and do well on the exam. . . . Athletes also learn about failure. No matter how good you are as an athlete, you [can] fail. I think that this serves students very well, not only for the classroom, but also after the classroom … because you fail and then you pick yourself up again and go forward.

Princeton’s Chris Sailer played lacrosse and field hockey at Harvard from 1977 to 1981 and has coached the two sports at Princeton since 1986, including 14 years as the head lacrosse coach. She likes to tell about one of her lacrosse players, Katie Gamble, from the class of 1998, who was among a group that did the Climb for the Cure up Mount McKinley: “She would tell me, ‘When I am up there on that mountain, I am going to remember the timed mile because I did not think that there was anything harder in my life that I would do.’ … Pushing through that really gave her strength and courage” to complete that climb and reach other goals in life. Among other lessons Sailer says athletes learn is that even if you give everything you have, it might not be as good as somebody else, but “you still give it and you still can make a contribution to the team.” Just because you’re not the star “does not mean that you stop trying or working to the best of your ability. All those things have a lot of carry-over value.”

While there is general agreement in the Ivy League about the value of sports participation, coaches have contrasting opinions when comparing programs and athletes of today with those of the 1970s and ’80s. Some saw an extremely high level of competition even in the restricted circumstances of those first two decades. Melanie Ginter, for instance, who swam for Yale in the 1970s, emphasizes that her women’s team trained with the men’s team, learning the same techniques, receiving equal coaching, and facing comparable expectations. Harvard track coach Frank Haggerty has mixed feelings when comparing students from the 1980s and today. Some today take their sport more seriously because, he says, “in high schools they have had better coaching and training.” Yet others have spent so much time on it earlier that the fun has gone out of it by the time they get to college, so they may compete fiercely for a while and then drop out of it to pursue some other interest. Often the students who “enjoy themselves the most and enjoy being out on the team,” Haggerty says, “are the students who develop while they are in college, as opposed to those students who are really very, very good in high school, highly recruited … and then get to college and have difficulty living under … the expectation that they are going to do X, Y, and Z.”

Dartmouth head soccer coach Kelly Blasius Knudsen, a 1991 graduate of the college, believes in the long-term benefits of a system that allows all Ivy athletes — like all other Ivy students — to pursue their many interests during their short time in school:

Athletics is not an entity by itself — our athletes are students first. Athletes in the Ivy League are very driven people. Sometimes we don’t attract all the top talent, yet the players make up for that in determination and team spirit. I enjoy coaching in the Ivy League because my athletes are multi-dimensional: they are fun to coach and they work hard. They take their soccer seriously yet they all have outside interests and pursuits.

Without scholarships as an aid for recruiting, coaches and administrators rely largely on the unparalleled value of an Ivy League education to convince their top prospects to choose an Ivy school. Competition for student-athletes has intensified as non-Ivy schools have begun to offer scholarships in additional sports like soccer and rowing, as well as in such traditional mainstays as basketball. As a result, recruitment in all schools, including the Ivy League, has become a major activity for coaches and administrators. Says Julie Sasner, a former Ivy Player of the Year in ice hockey at Harvard, who has been the head coach at Cornell and now Wisconsin:

Recruiting is about 80 percent of what we do, and absolutely the most important thing we do. The most fun thing we do is coach the team, but the recruiting is vital to keep your team going. While all college coaches benefit from these expanded opportunities, Ivy coaches face special challenges operating in a nonscholarship environment, as Sailer explains:

One of the biggest challenges for us is recruiting in the day and age of athletic scholarship where many talented lacrosse players who are going to look at Princeton are also going to be offered money from other good programs. The challenge is finding the family and the players who really value the education that they will get here at Princeton and the opportunities it will open up for them down the road. [Students have to evaluate] the experiences they are going to have here as an undergraduate versus the hard cash and inexpensive education that they can get someplace else. . . . That is the big challenge.

Certainly one of the most appealing aspects of the Ivy League for women student-athletes is the League’s unparalleled history in initiating and supporting women’s athletics. Jeff Orleans, Ivy League executive director, notes:

We were competing in a number of sports on a League-wide basis when no one else was playing those sports. We are the broadest-based league in the country. We have eight teams playing field hockey, eight teams playing women’s lacrosse; I don’t think there’s another league in the country that has six teams in either of those sports. Eight Ivy schools row, in addition to the sports of basketball, soccer, swimming, and all the others … that everybody plays. . . . There are probably 20 schools at the most that play collegiate women’s ice hockey; six of them are ours.

This long-standing history has created numerous school rivalries within the League. Some of the major rivalries of the 1990s came in lacrosse. Harvard won the first three titles of the 1990s outright, but by decade’s end, the rivalry between Dartmouth and Princeton had become among the fiercest in any Ivy sport. Princeton won a national championship in 1994 and Ivy titles in 1993, 1994, 1996, and 1997. But Dartmouth reached the national semifinals in 1995 (losing to Princeton) and 1998 and took Ivy championships in 1995, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Fans are also the beneficiaries of intense rivalries as they experience pre-game hype and the excitement of contests that are often decided in the final moments of play.

While the League feels the excitement generated through storied school rivalries, it also continues to add new Ivy championships to meet expansion of new sports within the institutions. The most recent addition to the roster of Ivy championships is golf, which was offered for the first time in April 1997 at the historic site of the men’s championship, the Bethpage (N.Y.) Golf Club. Golf thus became the 17th League sport to gain a championship, though with the loss of gymnastics in 1990, the League’s total remains at 16 at decade’s end.

In the midst of this expanded activity, the League’s administration itself acted to both demonstrate its commitment to women’s sports and better concentrate its attention on women’s issues. Most notably, the Council of Ivy Group Presidents — the body made up of the eight Ivy presidents that governs League athletics — lent its moral and financial support to the Silver Anniversary of Ivy League Women’s Championships Celebration. Their assistance allowed for the year-long commemoration to include two League-wide events; on-campus celebrations at each Ivy school; a traveling pictorial exhibit; a documentary video; and the publication of Silver Era, Golden Moments.

In all these ways and others, the Ivy League in the 1990s continues to support women’s athletics at the institutional, conference, regional, and national levels and to prepare for continued growth in the future. Through it all, the goal is to have each female student-athlete enjoy an experience like Cornell’s Cari Hills, who graduated in 1998:

I can proudly say that, throughout my four years at Cornell, my education was a combination of the time I spent in class and studying as well as the many hours I spent involved in athletics. . . . Two months ago, I was listening to my commencement speech as I sat on the same Astroturf field where I had played every home game for four years. I believe that it is in the Ivy League where two different uniforms can be worn on the same playing field: an NCAA Division I jersey and an honored cap and gown. I will always be proud of my years at Cornell and being part of the Ivy League tradition.