- Hometown – Highland Park, Illinois
- Sports – field hockey, ice hockey, track and field, basketball, lacrosse
- Major - Psychology
- Profession – Entrepreneur, Consultant, Manager
- Career after Wes: Includes starting an internet company (Domania), AVP for North American Programs at Road Scholar/Elderhostel, construction manager for Red Sox, small business consultant
- Advice to current student-athletes: Keep fighting!
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Highland Park, which had a high school that was a similar size to Wesleyan at the time – about 2000 students. Although as everywhere else, the boys’ sports program had more resources than the girls’, we had access to many sports and some great coaches. So I had played excellent field hockey, badminton, softball and other sports for four years, and one major reason I selected Wesleyan was the opportunity to play east coast field hockey which was legendary among Midwest players. Big mistake.
When I entered Wesleyan, in the fall of ’74, just after that first class of 100 women had graduated, the school had not really accepted the fact that women might want to do anything other than go to class. The athletic offerings were meager at best and poorly supported. For whatever reason, initially, the only woman among the coaching ranks specialized in fencing. And although one of my Wesleyan foremothers, Adrienne Bentman '74, who founded the field hockey team, had gotten the department to make this individual the coach for field hockey team, the coach had no knowledge of the sport and it was hard for me to see 4 years later that she had learned much. My naive freshman heart was broken and after two weeks I quit the team.
In November, I joined the basketball team in order to get back to athletics. I was not a good basketball player, but Stacey Vinson was a good coach and committed to making all her athletes better. We were lucky to have her. In the spring Stacey helped us start a track team, because as she said, “we don’t have enough athletes to play softball.”
In the end, I competed in 11 of the 12 possible seasons, in field hockey (3 years, captain last two), track and field (4 years, captain last 2 or 3), ice hockey (3 years, first women’s goalie), basketball (my freshman year), and lacrosse at the same time as track one year, because the man who coached the throwing events for the men, refused to coach “girls,” so I figured I could work on my track events on my own and go to lacrosse practices. It was fun.
I didn’t know that I should have thoughts on Title IX as a kid. I just wanted to play sports. It was clear that my opportunities were limited compared to the boys, but there were opportunities for me and those limitations were present in many areas for girls. How many math classes did I have with just one or two other girls? At least I had opportunities. The folks I really felt for were my female teaches and coaches who had fought even more significant limitations.
Clearly Wes has come a long way, but structural inequities remain. If the school expects athletics to have a large part in paying its way, how can the women’s sports compete with the men’s? if we just start by looking at the number of graduates from the 60s, 70s and 80s who are no longer worrying as much about paying for college tuition and may be able to be more charitable, clearly there would be far fewer women than men. And those women were also ones who may have chosen less lucrative professions than men or been in situations where their pay structure wasn’t the same as a man’s. But the women at Wes have the same requirement for fundraising as the men.
