Hall of Fame Inductees
A pioneer in women’s athletics at Wesleyan, Adrienne Bentman arrived on campus in 1970 as a member of the university’s inaugural class of women. Having played many sports in her youth and at Manheim Township High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she showed up at Fayerweather gym with her field hockey gear, looking for the coach. Instead, she found the coordinator of women’s athletics, Barbara Bascom, who promised her one competition if she could field a team of 11. Accepting the challenge, the energetic and tenacious Adrienne worked the hallways of the women’s dormitory floors looking for individuals with varsity experience (two), then JV experience (a few more), then anyone who had played the sport in P.E., and finally anyone who was willing to hold a stick and run up and down the field.
She eventually succeeded in recruiting 11 women, and Wesleyan’s first women’s athletic competition was played against Morse College of Yale University. The Cardinals won 5-0. A four-year field hockey captain, Adrienne continued to recruit each year’s new class of women to participate while becoming the de facto spokesperson for the women’s sports movement on campus and the lead charge in securing a locker room for female athletes. As well as field hockey, she played the sixth line in tennis singles and the third line in doubles during the spring.
In 1972, the first season on official record, the field hockey team played an eight-game schedule—finally wearing uniforms for the first time. Adrienne, now a junior, also founded the squash team and became its captain for two years. On top of that, she rowed the bow position on the first crew boat in the mornings before joining her tennis team in the afternoons. Now a four-sport athlete, Adrienne, along with others, successfully fought for access to the universal weight machine located in the men’s locker room.
After Wesleyan, Adrienne attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and did her residency in psychiatry at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, where she worked for six years as the psychiatrist in charge of the Adolescent and Family Treatment Unit. She currently is the program director of the Institute of Living/Hartford Hospital psychiatry residency program, re-establishing the program in 2003. It was a continuation of something she was familiar with from her time at Wesleyan: having a belief in something that didn't exist except in one's own mind.
