| 06/08/2007 |
| Wendy Smith, the first female AD at Haverford College, reflects on growing women's sports legacy at the school |
| By: David Block , Main Line Times |
By DAVID BLOCK
"I'm excited about the opportunity," said Smith, who never thought about how it felt to be the first woman to take the reins as the college's AD. "I've just been focusing on the job itself." Smith is currently the college's Acting Director of Athletics. In addition, she is the head coach of the women's soccer team, a position that she will relinquish in July. A 1987 Haverford College graduate, Smith has worked in the school's sports administration since 1990, where she was Facilities Manager and Assistant Athletic Director. Because she's quite familiar with the Fords' athletic program, taking on the job of AD should not be too challenging. "More significant than my promotion is the legacy that [Ford] women athletes created," said Smith. Last Saturday at Haverford College, Ford female athletes - past and present - had a special reunion, celebrating women's athletics at the school. The fall of 1977 was the first time that women students attended Haverford College; only three of the 18 female students who transferred to Haverford that fall chose to be athletes, so they competed for Bryn Mawr College. In the fall of 1980, female freshmen were admitted, and soon afterward women's athletics at Haverford College blossomed. "I remember women started playing sports at Haverford in 1979," said Ann Koger, the head coach of the Haverford women's tennis team since the squad's formation in 1981. That year, she also was the head coach of the Haverford women's volleyball team. "Some of the women's teams were larger in the early days because women had less sports to compete in," said Koger. "Now the rosters aren't as big because they have 22 sports to choose from. I remember when 24 women went out for tennis. Now the average number is 12." Vicki Mazurczyk Carlin, who played on Haverford College's first women's tennis team in 1981, remembered the difficulty in drumming up interest. "As a freshman, I remember the women were asked what sports they wanted to play, and most of them chose field hockey and lacrosse," said Carlin. "I was pushing for tennis - we finally got enough people to form a team." When Jenny Kehne Lipman enrolled at Haverford as a freshman in 1980, she played on the Fords' skeletal basketball team. "It was fun playing basketball, even though we only won one game my first year," said Lipman. "We only had eight or nine people on the team, so we didn't put a lot of emphasis on winning. We were trying to get a team together." She also remembers playing on the wooden floor of the college's fieldhouse while breathing in the dirt from the indoor track. Another memory was never having enough players to scrimmage five-on-five at basketball practices - they had to get men to practice with them. In the early days of women's athletics at Haverford, no one was cut from teams; in fact, women with no experience could join. Lipman remembered that some of her teammates never played basketball before. "The goal was to get women to have an athletic experience at Haverford," said Linda McConnell, who was head coach of the Haverford women's basketball team in the early 1980s as well as assistant coach of the women's lacrosse and field hockey teams. McConnell, now athletic director at Friends' Central School, remembered that Wendy Smith was one of the lacrosse players that she coached. "Wendy joined the team never having played lacrosse before and she went on to become All-American," said McConnell. "Lacrosse is easy to adapt to; if you can throw, catch and cradle, then you can play." Smith said, "I never played lacrosse in high school because we didn't have a girls' team. We didn't even have soccer until my senior year, so before I played soccer, I ran track and played volleyball." Smith was never upset that her high school had fewer sports teams for girls than for boys. "I just played whatever sports were available," she said. In 1986, the Haverford College women's lacrosse team, which included Smith, won the MAC title and qualified for the NCAA tourney. Deborah Gallagher, who coached women's lacrosse at Haverford from 1986 to 1991, remembered the girls' enthusiasm. "It was easy to motivate the girls because they wanted to make an impact on women's sports," said Gallagher. "It was great how the older players took the younger ones under their wings." Deb Freedman, who played on Haverford College's 1986 varsity lacrosse team as a freshman, was a starter with one other freshman and 10 seniors. "I felt like a kid in a candy shop, playing with older people who were better than me," said Freedman. "Even though we were Division III, we were just as good as Division I teams. I loved our cheer: 'Kill, kill, hate, hate, murder, murder, mutilate!'" The early women's soccer teams at Haverford also displayed enthusiasm. Chris Eaton, who attended Haverford College in 1983 as a freshman and played with Bryn Mawr College's soccer team her first year, said, "We wanted our own soccer team at Haverford. We had enough people and we were so determined." In the fall of 1984, Haverford College established a women's soccer team, but Eaton and her teammates still weren't satisfied. "We played on the Class of 1922 Field," said Eaton, "not the Walton Field like the men's soccer team did, and we weren't happy about that. Walton was a bigger field and it was in a more central location. We finally got a chance to play on Walton and we won. We played on Walton ever since." Eaton remembered that in the early 1980s at Haverford, it was common for the athletes to play two or three sports a year. "Now the students just play one sport because they now compete at a higher level," said Eaton. "It's more intense." Women's field hockey at Haverford also had a tough start. "I remember how we used to practice in the beginning," said Penny Hinckley, the first coach of the women's field hockey team. "There were 13 of us starting out in field hockey. The teams were the goalie and me, against the 11 other players." Before Hinckley coached at Haverford, she coached basketball at Princeton, while also working as Princeton's coordinator of women's sports. She said that when women freshmen first attended Princeton in the fall of 1970, the male students were less accepting than the men students at Haverford College, who welcomed the change. "In 1970, when I was coaching women's basketball, the male players tried to take over the court and interfere with our practices," said Hinckley. "They stopped after I screamed at them. That never happened at Haverford. The men were always respectful of the women." One of Hinckley's first field hockey players, Lydia Martin, who came in the fall of 1981 concurred. "Because this was a Quaker school, the guys were very respectful," said Martin. "It was easy for Haverford to go co-ed. Some of the women at Bryn Mawr College weren't happy because they came to Bryn Mawr thinking that Haverford would be their 'brother school.'" Martin said, "We had a weak field hockey team in the beginning. There were a lot of beginners. Nobody was cut from the team. It didn't matter how good you were or how bad you played, everyone was welcomed." Otto Gonzalez, who enrolled at Haverford College in 1983 and joined the men's soccer team, said that women definitely belonged there. "You never would have guessed that Haverford College had only recently gone co-ed," said Gonzalez. "It seemed as though women had been there a long time."
|