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All About Attitude
A creeping conviction that Yale athletics could survive by being “good enough” has been replaced by a dedication to becoming the best.
February 2000
by Bruce Fellman

There were tears in Tom Beckett’s eyes as the last seconds ticked off the clock during The Game. And although Yale’s athletics director was certainly pleased with the final 24-to-21 score, the more powerful cause of his emotion was actually another number: 52,484.

“When I started here in 1994, I heard that we'd never put 50,000 fans in the Bowl ever again,” says Beckett. “But when I came in for The Game and saw that enormous crowd of students, faculty, administrators, New Haven residents, and alumni from all over gathered together to celebrate—well, it was a galvanizing moment for Yale athletics.”

Galvanizing—and a perfect symbol for what many are calling a “renaissance” in the University’s varsity sports program.

The Bowl is quiet now, and new teams have taken center stage. But the buzz generated both by the football victory last November and by the rejuvenation of athletics in general is palpable on campus and wherever Yale teams are meeting their opponents.

By all accounts, the chief architect of this new state of affairs is Beckett himself, whom President Richard C. Levin (himself a passionate sports fan) hired six years ago to take over a program that was a shadow of its former self. Beckett came to Yale from the President’s alma mater, Stanford, where he had been associate director of athletics for 11 years. Stanford is no stranger to national prominence on the playing field and in the classroom, and Beckett hoped to bring one lesson from his Stanford experience to Yale: the notion that “athletic and academic excellence need not be mutually exclusive.”

Of course, achieving this marriage of brains and brawn, intellect and athletic clout, has always been tricky. In 1922 in the Yale Alumni Weekly (the predecessor of this magazine), sportswriter Heywood Broun voiced a remarkably modern sentiment when he complained that Harvard, at Yale’s expense, was becoming too successful in football. The cause, Broun opined, was literature. “Within a year we have seen with our own eyes a Yale football captain listening to a reading of lyric poetry!” wrote a horrified Broun.

No wonder the kids couldn’t beat the Crimson.

The primary purpose of the Ivy League, which was formed in 1954, was to create a controlled environment in which the “scholar athlete” could win as well as graduate. And while a few alumni may still pine for the days when Yale dominated the national rankings, Beckett was hired to help the University excel among its Ivy rivals, and by Ivy rules. “My challenge was and is to ensure that year in and year out, all of our teams are able to compete for an Ivy League championship,” he says.

And that, to a considerable degree, is what has begun to happen. Eric Johnson’s diving catch of a Joe Walland pass with less than half a minute remaining not only nailed down a Yale victory over Harvard on November 20 (see “The Game, The Catch, The Title”), it also gave the Elis a share of the Ivy League football crown and a 9–1 record, to say nothing of putting an exclamation point on a remarkable turnaround in Yale football.

Nor was this squad alone in having reached the upper echelons. Men’s soccer, at 13–5–1 (4–2–1 in the Ivy League), began the autumn campaign by shocking defending national champion Indiana 2–1. The win was no fluke, for the team then proceeded to amass the most soccer victories in Yale history in a season that saw the squad move on to the NCAA tournament. (In the second round, Yale lost to a tough University of Connecticut team that would itself be defeated by tournament finalist Santa Clara.)

Last June, the men’s heavyweight crew turned back a challenge from Harvard, stunning a team that is accustomed to dominating the competition. Both the women’s and men’s swimming and fencing teams have become consistent powerhouses. The women’s soccer and men’s hockey teams garnered ECAC championships two years ago, and among every one of Yale’s 33 varsity endeavors—even the ones that so far are without winning records—there’s a metamorphosis in progress that is best summed up by men’s soccer coach Brian Tompkins. “When I got here four years ago,” he recalls, “we were the kind of team that would fold its tent when the going got rough, and so people didn’t worry about Yale. But we’ve gone from sparring partners to champions, and in the process, we’ve become the team that nobody likes to play.”

This transformation has four components. “The basic building block is our tradition,” says Beckett, ticking off a series of contests going back to the beginning of American intercollegiatecompetition in the middle of the 19th century. “The other components,” says the director, “are outstanding coaching, an aggressive recruiting plan, and the creation of facilities that are second to none.”

Beckett oversees a coaching staff made up of both veterans and relative newcomers. Among the former is Barbara Tonry (women’s gymnastics), Dave Vogel (men’s heavyweight crew), and Frank Keefe (men’s and women’s swimming. The latter group includes Amy Backus (women’s basketball), James Jones (men’s basketball), Rudy Meredith (women’s soccer), Mark Talbott (women’s squash), and Will Porter (women’s crew).

In the current Yale culture, coaches are, first and foremost, master teachers and motivators—which doesn’t mean that winning doesn’t matter. “In the end, it all comes down to attitude and mental toughness,” says Jack Siedlecki, now in his fourth year as Yale’s football coach. “There’s usually tremendous parity among Ivy League teams, so our job is to hone athletic skills and get our kids to believe in themselves and each other.”

Siedlecki’s positivism begins at his computer (the screen saver reads “Beat Harvard”), and it was evident even during his first season in 1997, when his team finished 1 and 9. In the middle of that trying year, the coach read to his charges from High Hopes: Taking the Purple to Pasadena. The book is former Northwestern football coach Gary Barnett’s account of how he led the perennial doormat of the Big Ten to a league championship and a Rose Bowl game in 1995, and the chapter Siedlecki chose to share was about “belief without evidence.”

It was an especially apt text, for while Yale’s on-the-field record was dismal, “we knew we were making progress,” says Siedlecki, who in his previous job turned Amherst’s football program around after years of losses. “We were working hard, and we played hard. Still, it’s a lot easier to believe in yourself when you’re winning.”

Adversity can tear you down, but it can also build character. The team members, experienced and full of Siedlecki-inspired confidence, went 6 and 4 the next season and finished with a flourish, beating Harvard in the closing moments and almost snagging an Ivy title. A winning attitude is, according to the coach, “a learned experience,” and his team learned so well that in the most recent Game, when Harvard scored a go-ahead touchdown late in the fourth quarter and Yale fans were groaning at the prospect of another “spoiler” loss, there was no thought among the players of folding tents. “We didn’t feel out of the game at all,” says Siedlecki. “There was no one out there who didn’t believe we'd come from behind and win.”

Men’s soccer coach Tompkins recalls a similar experience when he took over a team four years ago whose attitude was essentially “we’ll try but we’ll probably lose.” Such defeatism was mirrored in the squad’s performance.”

At a team meeting in May 1996, I asked the players, ‘what would be a good record?’ Their answer was 9–8,” said Tompkins, adding that this would have been a major improvement for a squad that had just gone 5–10–2. “So I said, ‘Let’s pick the eight games we intend to lose.’ They all looked at me as if I was crazy. Then, a light went on.”

The coach went to work, as he puts it, “creating belief and converting the flock” with a blend of day-by-day, game-by-game preparations and “a focus on roles, responsibilities, and doing your job.” Tompkins had used this process-oriented, almost corporate approach (complete with job descriptions and performance reviews) to turn around the program at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and it has worked in New Haven as well. The victories began to accumulate, the team posted winning seasons, and when his players stepped on the field against UConn in the second round of last fall’s NCAA championship tournament, “they weren’t at all scared. They were ready to show that they could play with the best teams in the country.”

But while coaching is critical to this kind of change, it rarely succeeds in isolation. Perhaps the defining characteristic of Beckett’s time at Yale so far has been an emphasis on improved communications throughout the athletics department and the University at large. “We wanted to develop a collegial spirit, a place where our staff could get together and share ideas,” says Beckett, who developed just such a gathering spot outside his office at Ray Tompkins House.

Every morning, there’s coffee and tea (plus bagels and cream cheese, along with danish pastry on Thursdays) as well as a half-dozen newspapers. The athletics director has also initiated regular seminars on subjects ranging from weight training to recruiting strategies, and at least once a month, he has hosted get-togethers with members of Yale’s administration, particularly people involved in the crucial areas of admissions and financial aid.

“Tom’s a skilled and sensitive bridge-builder,” says Tompkins. “He’s worked to ensure that we’re all on the same page, and as a result, both the quantity and quality of communications have improved.”

Nowhere has this improvement been more obvious and important than in the relationship between the department and the admissions office. Great coaches can work miracles, but their labors are definitely made easier by having a certain amount of talent to work with.

Beckett and Richard Shaw, who has been dean of admissions and financial aid since 1992, have created a system that enables information on recruits to flow easily and coherently between their offices. Colleen Lim, associate director of varsity athletics, and Diana Cooke, associate director of undergraduate admissions, are the point people for a network in which each sport has an admissions and financial aid liaison on Hillhouse Avenue.

“Ultimately, we’re the gatekeepers,” says Shaw, “but because of the communications structures we’ve set up, we can better understand and respond to each others’ needs.”

One significant result of this effort occurred in 1995 when the admissions office agreed to increase the number of “likely” letters that were sent out to student athletes who were being recruited. The letters told candidates that they were likely—but not definitely—to be admitted to Yale, and they also gave recruits a rough estimate of how much financial aid they could expect to receive.

The policy, which was already in place at other Ivy League universities, helped negate a persistent grumbling that Yale’s less-than-stellar athletic performance was the result of a lack of energy, to say nothing of a less-than-welcoming attitude toward student-athletes on the part of admissions. “There is no doubt that we lost scores of talented players over the years because the admissions office did not act promptly on their applications,” declares former football coach Carm Cozza in True Blue, a memoir in which he attributes at least some of the slippage of his sport at Yale to the gatekeepers.

Dean Shaw, who oversaw the recruitment of numerous big-time athletes when he served as director of admissions at the University of Michigan, is not about to cast aspersions on his Yale predecessors, but he concurs with Cozza about the critical importance of timely decisions. “Student athletes are under a lot of pressure to make earlier and earlier commitments, particularly when they’re being recruited by schools that offer merit or athletic scholarships,” says Shaw.

Since financial aid at Yale is based solely on a recruit’s ability to pay, coaches (this is true throughout the Ivy League) cannot offer an athlete a “free ride,” or even a partial ride, solely on the basis of extraordinary ability to pull an oar, run the 100, paint the inside corner of the plate, or drill a three-pointer. Nor can a potential Venus Williams, Mark McGwire, or Michael Jordan be offered the kind of national stage on which to demonstrate his or her talent and thus attract multimillion-dollar professional contracts. The recent large crowd at the Bowl—The Game was broadcast this year by DirecTV to a potential audience of seven million subscribers—notwithstanding, most contests have relatively small audiences. An aggressive marketing plan, underwritten by local corporations, is helping to boost attendance at games, but the national networks are simply not interested in Ivy athletics.

“We’re not serving as a minor league for any pro sport,” says hockey coach Tim Taylor, “and while some of our kids may be thinking of going on to the pros, the common denominator among our recruits is that they’re coming here for an education that will serve them well after their athletic skills leave their bodies. They play hockey because it’s a passion, but, just like the other sports, or like many other activities, it’s an extracurricular passion.”

This requires coaches to search for a certain kind of athlete, one who “thinks about hoops and academics on the same plane,” says James Jones, who in his first season at Yale is attempting to mold a winner out of a men’s basketball team that at one point last year was ranked dead last in the country.

Finding such people is grueling, year-round work, but, says admissions dean Shaw, it is far from impossible. “Tom has encouraged his staff to cast their nets wide and see the entire nation, even the world, as their oyster,” says Shaw, adding that because of improved communications, admissions staffers are not averse to giving coaches information about overlooked prospects that was gleaned during routine admissions visits to high schools. And then there are the buildings. Like the rest of the Yale campus, the athletic facilities long suffered from “deferred maintenance.” And, like the rest of the campus, they are rapidly being transformed. When student athletes come to New Haven—and increasingly, this happens during special recruiting weekends that are held in the summer between the junior and senior year—they will find some of the renovated sports facilities among the best anywhere.

The Payne Whitney Gymnasium—the venerable “cathedral of sweat”—has been undergoing a phased multimillion-dollar upgrading, begun in the mid-1990s. The campaign has so far resulted in the state-of-the-art Brady squash courts, the Brooks-Dwyer Varsity Weight Room, the Adrian C. Israel Fitness Center, the John J. Lee basketball amphitheater, and the William K. Lanman wing, which includes four regulation-size basketball courts and an elevated running track. The rest of the gym is scheduled for rehabilitation over the next few years.”

New facilities—the ones we’ve finished and the ones still to come, like the boathouse—have breathed life into our programs,” says Tom Beckett. “Not only do the improvements add to our ability to attract top-quality athletes and help them reach their potential, everyone in the campus community can enjoy what we, with the help of some generous alumni, have been able to build.” (The Bowl, which has had some cosmetic improvements in recent years, remains a major challenge.)

Tradition, coaching, recruiting, facilities, communications: success in sports—and a successful sports program—always comes down to the fundamentals. All of them are now firmly in place.

“When we started out, we were selling a dream,” says Jack Siedlecki, who is speaking of football but could just as easily be describing any of Yale’s athletics endeavors. “Now, we’re selling reality.”  

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