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Women Athletes Take the Spotlight
The renovation of the Lapham Field House to accommodate women and men equally represents a milestone in Yale’s acceptance of women as full-fledged athletes.
November 1993
by Marc Wortman
Competitive rowing has always meant a hefty measure of pain for its practitioners,
but for Yale’s first women crews, there was even more discomfort off the water than on it. Fully seven years after the admission of female undergraduates in 1969, the women’s crew still had no facilities of its own at the Derby boathouse, and the situation was getting hazardous. In the late fall of 1975, the women would end their daily workouts on the Housatonic River and stow their shells and oars just as the men did. But then, while the men showered and changed in their own locker room, the women sat huddled on the bus, their sweat mingling with the melting ice on their warmups, until the men were ready for the 30-minute ride back to Payne Whitney. That year several team members fell ill; a few developed pneumonia and ended up in the hospital. Despite repeated requests from team members for even temporary changing facilities, Yale said only that it would eventually renovate the existing structure to accommodate them. No administrator could say when.
Change, concluded team captain Christine Ernst ’76, who had rowed to a silver medal in the previous summer’s world championships and went on to row in the summer Olympics, would never happen without forcing the issue. “We had plenty of time to sit on the bus and stew and plot,” she recalled recently. On March 4 of that year, Ernst and 17 teammates marched into the office of Joni Barnett, now director of community relations but then the director of women’s athletics. The students stripped off their shirts. Written across their bare chests and backs were the words “TITLE IX,” representing the 1972 civil rights code that mandated equal opportunity for women in federally supported institutions. Ernst read a statement demanding boathouse facilities of their own. The New York Times and other national media quickly picked up the well-planted story. A few days later a heated trailer with showers and lockers arrived in Derby. By the next racing season, the University had finally made good on its original promise by giving the women a locker room of their own.
In the intervening years, attitudes about the place of women as athletes at Yale have changed dramatically, and there is no better symbol of that than what has happened to the Lapham Field House adjacent to the Bowl. When it opened in 1923, the building provided locker rooms for football, track-and-field, soccer, and baseball. By the time women were added to the mix 50 years later, the already overcrowded building was badly deteriorated, and the women suffered the most. But when Lapham was rededicated this past September 18 following a thorough renovation, no one was complaining about substandard facilities for either gender.
Renamed the Lapham Field House at the Joel E. Smilow (’54) Field Center in honor of the major donor (who five years ago endowed the position of head football coach), the $7-million project reflects the latest in the care and equipping of college athletes. The existing structure was expanded by some 14,000 square feet to accommodate locker rooms, training facilities, storage, and an elegant reception area. Through it all, careful attention was paid by the architects (the firm of Edward Larrabee Barnes/John M.Y. Lee) to serving the needs of female and male athletes equally. “We made the effort to insure parity of facilities and space assignment,” says Athletic Director Ed Woodsum (’53, ’58LLB). “This will eliminate inequities among teams.”
The very idea that someone like Woodsum believes that women deserve equal facilities represents the evolving attitude surrounding female athletics at Yale. A former football star and University trustee, Woodsum attended Yale in an era when coeducation was still a generation away and women had no business on its athletic fields except as spectators. Some women’s coaches claim that when Woodsum arrived at his Ray Tompkins House office six years ago (he will be returning to his native Maine at the end of his term next spring), he was less than fully enthusiastic about the cause of women athletes. Now, he insists, “I don’t care if it’s a man or a woman: Athletes here are self-starters, high achievers, and their feelings about the University are framed by their athletic experience. That’s the attitude Yale should be fostering.” Citing as an example the nationally competitive women’s cross country team, Woodsum says with evident fervor, “I admire those young athletes as much as the running back with 4.4 speed or the guard with the soft jump shot. There is the same intensity, commitment, and dedication. An athlete’s an athlete.&rdquo';
Those qualities have helped propel Yale women into the upper echelons of the Ivy League and, in some cases, won them national recognition. Last year, women’s softball, swimming, gymnastics, and soccer all won Ivy titles and performed well in post-season competition against nationally ranked teams. The women’s four won the national crew championship. In 18 years, the gymnastics team has won the Ivy title nine times, never finishing below second, and has been ranked as high as fourth in the nation. Cross country, which placed among the nation’s top ten squads three years running (1987–89), fencing (third in the nation last year), and squash (the 1992 national champions) have been historically strong, and the recently beefed-up basketball program has shown marked improvement. Two athletes were named finalists for the NCAA
Woman of the Year Award in successive years: Kristine Campbell ’91, captain of the fencing team, and lacrosse captain Catherine Sharkey ’92. Over the years, a handful of Yale women have competed in the Olympics, and many more have been honored as All-Americans; several have gone on to careers as coaches of their own teams.
Those accomplishments are all the more impressive for the brief span of time in which they occurred. Yale’s first women athletes took the field in 1970 as members of a field hockey club (the athletic department also offered women synchronized swimming and a handful of other more “feminine” physical education courses). A tennis squad was organized in 1971. The teams were granted varsity status in 1973 and were followed by swimming, squash, crew, fencing, gymnastics, and basketball by the end of 1974. Because Yale maintained a policy of not launching sports programs for women unless students first indicated an interest, some potential athletes spent their entire college careers lobbying for a team and never got to play at all.
The promulgation of Title IX of the federal Civil Rights Code in the spring of 1972 first aroused administrators’ concern about the need to bring women’s programs into line with the men’s. At the time of the crew team protest, Yale had two years left before the federal government required full compliance with the ordinance, but enforcement remained rare. Anne Keating ’77 remembers playing on varsity teams that were less like the men’s programs than club sports. At a school with more than 120 years of tradition behind its male intercollegiate athletic programs, the needs of the men always came first. As the athletics department now readily admits, meals, travel arrangements, coaching staffs, practice fields and times, and even uniforms were inadequate at best for women. Teams practiced in parking lots or on the varsity fields after the men finished; they were forced to borrow uniforms, and to stay with friends for away games. “Anything we wanted,” says Keating, “we had to fight for.”
For the first years, the only places available to the women at Lapham were the press room and the basement, which they shared with their opponents and which was frequently flooded during bad weather. “It was the most unbelievable pit,&rdqip; recalls Athletics Capital Projects manager Jack Merrill ’67, who directed the renovation of the building. “We finally had to shut it down.”
Barbara Tonry, a former Olympic gymnast and women’s gymnastics coach since 1975, says, “We’ve come a long way from borrowing uniforms from the high school team, where I also coached. For years, it was tough just looking presentable.” These days, gymnastics meets draw close to 300 spectators, and the teams compete successfully against schools that offer athletic scholarships. (Still, most Yale fans know the gymnasts better for their work parking cars at the Bowl during football season to raise travel money.)
There is no longer any lack of opportunity to compete. The Hartford Courant last year in a series of articles on the impact in Connecticut of Title IX found that more than 65 percent of Yale’s nearly 1,000 intercollegiate athletes are men while men compose around 55 percent of the total student body. This places Yale squarely in the upper ranks of schools around the nation, but a significant gap remains. “You need relative parity of numbers in the student population at large and in sports programs,” explains Woodsum. He notes that team budgets also figure into the recent interpretations of the statute. “You can’t get away with women’s programs as mere shells of men’s,” he says. Even at Yale, the so-called “showcase” sports—men’s basketball, football, and ice hockey—have budgets far exceeding those for women (football alone has seven full-time coaches, a 95-member varsity, and a 50-member junior varsity, while the women’s teams have a maximum of 25 players and three coaches).
At a time when the University faces a budget deficit, bringing the athletic program into relative parity seems all but impossible without cutting existing programs or finding some new source of revenue. Woodsum has already exercised the first option, by cutting wrestling and water polo. Those cuts provoked loud criticism and a lawsuit by alumni of the wrestling squads.
That suit was dismissed, but similar actions at other schools have had better success. Members of the gymnastics and volleyball teams at Brown last spring sued to protest the cutting of their programs and forced the school to reinstate them, and Cornell women are now taking legal action to block planned cuts of fencing and gymnastics. Princeton, which eliminated its wrestling team last year, may face a reverse-discrimination suit. Wrestlers there contend that their relatively less-prominent sport was cut because the school was unwilling to increase women’s programs to comply with Title IX and instead dropped a men’s program to bring the numbers more into line.
To avoid additional cuts at Yale, administrators are being forced to find new ways to pay for existing programs, but the search has some built-in problems. This is especially true for women’s ice hockey, which has a part-time coach, limited ice time at Ingalls Rink, and mediocre locker rooms, while the men’s team has three full-time coaches, a national schedule, and facilities that have recently undergone a major renovation. “Women’s ice hockey needs time to develop,” points out Varsity Sports director Barbara Chesler. “There are only nine Division 1 teams in the country.” Others argue that as long as women’s programs are treated as second-class teams at the most prominent places, such as Yale, no progress is likely to be made at all at other schools.
Another aspect of support for women’s athletics at Yale and elsewhere is historical. Men’s teams have century-long traditions and well-developed means to elicit alumni support in both funding and recruiting. Endowments and sports associations help cover expenses such as travel, special team banquets, and (when things are at their best) championship rings. “We’re only about 20 years into sports coeducation,” says Chesler, “and that’s not very many alums. There are maybe ten times as many men.” Adds Tonry: “Young alumnae give back, but $10 or $15 doesn’t go very far.”
Lacking strong outside financial support, Yale attempts to cover costs for women out of its general funds, but coming up with the money can be difficult. “We’re making a conscious effort to even things out,” says Woodsum. “We want the experience to be comparable. My goal is to be competitive, and if it requires trips to the West Coast for recruits, we need to figure out how to do that.”
Coaches are the first to recognize the efforts being made—and to voice concern that more needs to be done. Women’s soccer coach Felice Duffy is now in her ninth year at Yale. Her team won Yale’s first women’s Ivy soccer title last year and finished 17th nationally out of more than 80 Division 1 schools, most of which offer soccer scholarships. She knows the ramifications of Title IX intimately. As an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, Duffy forced the school to create a women’s soccer program by filing and winning a Title IX suit. She went on to become an All-American and a leading proponent of the sport for women. (In the wake of recent Title IX decisions, 50 other Division 1 schools plan to launch women’s soccer programs in the next two to three years.) “Since I’ve been here,” Duffy says, “there has been tremendous growth in women’s programs. Yale is one of the more progressive places relative to other programs in the country. If there were no money constraints, then Yale would be truly equal between men and women.” Cecelia DeMarco, who is in her fourth year as women’s basketball coach, concurs. “I’m proud of where we are,” she says. “But just because we’re ahead of other schools doesn’t mean we’re where we should be.”
While women’s programs have yet to achieve complete parity with the men in funding and facilities, earning respect for their play is no longer the problem it once was. “Yale heralds success,” says Duffy. “The whole environment here is based on achievement. The kids are proud of being female athletes at Yale because they know what it takes.”
One of the proudest is this year’s crew captain, Eliza Miller ’94, a member of the national hampionship four, who has seen major progress even in her three years at Yale. “Crew is a really, really sexist sport,” she says. “When I was a freshman, the senior men were horrible. The men’s team’s attitude has become so much healthier. Now I feel we’re really fortunate to be here.” Especially in comparison to a semester she spent studying and rowing at Oxford. “Everything there was for the men,” she says. “Yale is an exception. They want to give us what we want here.” As an example, she points out that the women and lightweight men’s crew have recently linked their alumni associations and share in the benefits from fundraising.
While female athletes rarely suffer the “dumb jock” labels that occasionally plague the men, there are other stereotypes they must face, such as a fear of losing their femininity by becoming too physically imposing. “Some have a resistance to lifting weights,” says Duffy, who considers year-round strength conditioning vital to her team’s success. “They say, ‘I don’t want to bulk up.’
But the more athletes we get in, the less resistance there is.” The stereotypes about “Amazons” and lesbians are also fading. Says DeMarco: “These young women will not tolerate being discriminated against because of things they are or do.”
In February, alumnae will be invited back to campus to review the state of women’s athletics as part of the National Women’s and Girls’ Sports Week celebration. To mark the event, Yale’s athletics department will also hold a 25th anniversary celebration of the beginnings of coeducation in sports. “I hope a lot of people come back,” says Chesler. “They were pioneers. They really struggled in the 1970s, and they deserve to be recognized.”  |
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