In 1976, fencing and tennis grew to become the primary two girls’s varsity sports activities at Notre Dame. Fifty years later, 13 feminine varsity squads share a legacy that features 16 nationwide championships, lots of of All-America honors and dozens of Olympians — achievements collected over many years of athletic dedication that created lifetimes
of good recollections for members.
At first, involvement in varsity athletics wasn’t an choice for Notre Dame girls. While it took 4 years as soon as the University went absolutely coeducational to kind the primary varsity groups, for some sports activities, the wait lasted many years — the latest addition being girls’s rowing in 1998.
In the meantime, Notre Dame girls competed on the highest ranges they may — principally in a sprawling array of membership sports activities groups. The membership tennis crew began issues in 1972, adopted by rowing and fencing golf equipment in 1973, and basketball and area hockey golf equipment a 12 months later. Ellen Hughes ’77, Jane Lammers ’77 and others based the Women’s Athletic Association within the fall of 1974 to assist golf equipment increase funds, muster college help and finally push for varsity standing.
Lammers was a key advocate for rising girls’s athletics at Notre Dame as a result of of her reference to athletic director Edward “Moose” Krause ’34, who had coached her father, Paul Lammers ’49, in basketball within the Forties. She met with Krause on a number of events, first to realize approval for membership tennis and finally to raise the crew to varsity.
“He was concerned about our long hair,” Lammers recollects, referring to an early dialog about how Notre Dame girls can be anticipated to compete. Lammers mentioned she pointed Krause to a male Irish monitor star with lengthy locks and instructed him that if a person might do it, so might the ladies.
Lammers took on supervisor duties for the membership tennis crew, calling different Midwestern faculties from her Badin Hall dorm room to set a schedule. After a breakthrough with Valparaiso University, a half-dozen different faculties agreed to go to Notre Dame to play tennis.
Title IX, a landmark gender fairness regulation handed in 1972, led to a dramatic enhance in girls’s participation in sports activities in any respect ranges. Before that, women and girls had far fewer alternatives to develop their athletic expertise.
Many of Notre Dame’s first feminine athletes had no prior expertise of their chosen sports activities. Jody Gormley ’77 signed up for rowing on the membership truthful on a whim. Luckily for her, the crew was on sq. one as nicely. The fall of 1973 didn’t deliver any races or opponents. Gormley says there merely weren’t sufficient girls’s crews within the Midwest to compete with.
That meant they’d time to construct belief with the boys’s rowing employees. One early concern was that girls wouldn’t be capable to elevate the eight-person shells used within the heavyweight races, so 12 girls have been assigned to hold each.
The restricted quantity of girls within the scholar physique in these early years additionally meant few have been obtainable to advocate for his or her place in Irish athletics. “My freshman year there were 800 women and 5,000 men,” Gormley recollects. Despite this, she says female and male rowers received alongside nicely, sharing a stretch of the St. Joseph River in Mishawaka for early morning practices and touring collectively to meets.
Formal competitors arrived in spring 1974, when Gormley and others participated in a four-person race in opposition to a highschool crew on Long Island. “It was everyone’s first race,” she says. It befell in a thick fog. Gormley says their boat glided previous the end line unaware, stopping solely when the organizers caught as much as them to announce they’d received.
She embraced the haphazardness of the early years and laughs now about scavenging for meals on crew journeys. During one spring break in Washington, D.C., the ladies snuck into Trinity College’s eating corridor to get butter for his or her meals.
From 1977 to ’79, Gormley coached girls’s rowing when nobody else would. She says being an athlete was extra enjoyable than teaching, however she wished to help a bunch she had come to like.
Sally Duffy, then the rector of Lewis Hall and coach of the ladies’s membership basketball crew from 1975 to ’77, recollects no scarcity of curiosity amongst Notre Dame girls in collaborating. Building expertise was one other matter.
“Some schools were already starting to bring in women on scholarships . . . and Notre Dame wasn’t there yet,” she says. Men’s basketball coach Digger Phelps was an early supporter, encouraging the thought of a girls’s varsity crew.
Upsetting Northwestern’s varsity on January 30, 1976, the Notre Dame membership crew gained respect from legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who got here right down to the ground to introduce himself and congratulate Duffy.
During the 1976-77 educational 12 months, Notre Dame issued its first monograms to feminine student-athletes: Mary Shukis Behler ’79 (tennis), Jane Lammers (tennis), Chris Marciniak ’77 (fencing), Catherine Buzard Sazdanoff ’78 (fencing) and Kathy Valdiserri ’78 (fencing).
Sazdanoff spent her first two years on the fencing membership earlier than becoming a member of the varsity, one thing she calls an “unexpected treasure.” Before school, her solely fencing expertise was a highschool gymnasium elective. “I don’t count it as really experience because I’m a lefty, and the person who taught fencing did not know how to teach left-handed,” she says. Instead, she attributes her formation to Mike DeCicco ’49, ’50M.S., whose varsity fencing squads received 5 nationwide championships.
“All of a sudden I’m a part of the Notre Dame sports world, and he and all the coaches treated it and treated us like the football players or the basketball players,” she says. She famous her opponents’ enchancment because the years went on. Each season the schedule received more durable as extra varsity packages popped up across the nation.
As girls’s sports activities blossomed at Notre Dame, their aspirations grew as nicely. Fencing received the varsity’s first girls’s nationwide title in 1987, adopted by soccer in 1995.
Cindy Daws ’97, a co-captain of that 1995 squad, was recruited by many well-established packages earlier than deciding on Notre Dame. Irish girls’s soccer had achieved varsity standing in 1989. “I came to Notre Dame to help build a program and win a national championship,” she says.
In Daws’ freshman 12 months, the Irish made their first look within the NCAA match. The subsequent 12 months, the crew misplaced within the championship recreation to North Carolina, one of the faculties that had tried to recruit Daws. When the Irish lastly received the nationwide title her junior 12 months, she says, the sensation was “complete, utter excitement and accomplishment.”
Women’s basketball was additionally rising within the Nineties underneath head coach Muffet McGraw. Star athletes like heart Ruth Riley ’01, ’16MBA, helped pull the crew nearer to the mountaintop.
Riley’s backstory illustrates modifications that had already taken place in women’ sports activities. She started her basketball profession within the fourth grade, and lettered in basketball, volleyball and monitor in highschool. Growing up in Macy, Indiana, Riley says, Notre Dame was her selection from the start. “I liked the aspect of the University that had excellent athletics, academics and faith,” she says.
When she arrived in 1997, the ladies’s basketball crew was coming off its first Final Four. “I probably never worked so hard as I did that freshman year in college,” she says.
That work wouldn’t go unnoticed. By the time she graduated, she had received participant of the 12 months honors from 4 main organizations, was a two-time first-team All-American and the Academic All-American of the Year. She additionally helped earn the 2001 NCAA championship, sinking two game-winning free throws in opposition to Purdue to seize the primary of two nationwide titles for Irish girls’s basketball. Riley known as these final moments in an Irish jersey her “storybook ending,” however there was extra to come back in her profession.
After commencement, she was chosen within the first spherical of the WNBA draft by the Miami Sol and later received two skilled championships with the Detroit Shock. She additionally competed within the 2004 Olympics in Athens, successful gold for Team USA, and is now the senior director of crew improvement for the NBA’s Miami Heat.
Other pioneers of girls’s sports activities at Notre Dame have remained energetic. Since 2012, Gormley has convened Notre Dame alumni rowers to race on the Head of the Charles, a distinguished occasion in Boston. Her “NDames” crew consists principally of girls of their 60s, with the oldest athlete on their roster nonetheless competing at age 82.
Others took completely different paths. Duffy joined the Sisters of Charity, then had an extended profession as an administrator at a Cincinnati hospital. Today, Sister Sally Duffy, S.C., says she nonetheless follows the ladies’s crew religiously and returns to campus often to fulfill with gamers younger and outdated.
As Notre Dame celebrates the fiftieth 12 months of varsity girls’s athletics, Gormley, Riley and others are additionally making their manner again to campus to fulfill outdated associates. They be part of hundreds of alumnae who, by means of exhausting work and a willingness to push boundaries, have earned their place in Notre Dame athletic historical past.
Gray Nocjar is a junior electrical engineering main with minors in vitality research and journalism. He was this journal’s fall intern.