You've come a long way, athlete
Women's sports have made great strides in 25 years
Archived article from Nov 6, 1998
By Douglas Frank
At a special ceremony during halftime of the Rutgers-Temple football game Oct. 31, a baker's dozen of former Rutgers alumnae were honored as the representatives of hundreds of women student-athletes who played on Scarlet fields and courts since Title IX paved the way for women's participation in intercollegiate sports throughout the country a quarter century ago.
Rutgers is celebrating its 25th year of women's athletics, harking back to the 1974-75 season when it began women's intercollegiate competition in seven sports.
The 13 women athletes were selected by polling the current coaches to determine who had the greatest impact on their sport in their years at Rutgers (see sidebar). Each received a picture frame commemorating the anniversary, to be used with a photo taken of the occasion.
Also honored for their contributions to women's athletics were Rita Kay Thomas, senior assistant athletic director, who was hired in 1974 as director of women's athletics; and former Rutgers faculty members Nancy Mitchell and Jan Koontz, who were instrumental in developing the program.
Even as the Title IX legislation was being signed by President Nixon in 1972, Rutgers was making plans to include women's teams in its intercollegiate athletics program. That same year, Rutgers began admitting women to all of its colleges and a charter committee was created to develop the transition of Rutgers athletics into a complete program of competition for men and women.
After two years of discussion, the women's intercollegiate athletics program began with sports that had been successful at Douglass College on a "club" basis. These were basketball, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, field hockey, indoor track and outdoor track. In 1975-76, gymnastics and crew were added, and in 1977-78 golf, fencing and volley-ball made their debuts. Soccer was added in 1984.
These teams now compete at the NCAA Division I level, and Rutgers also has women's teams that compete in Division III at Newark: tennis, volleyball, basketball and softball; and at Camden: soccer, track and cross country, softball and basketball.
Over the years many individuals and teams have stood out in the women's program at New Brunswick.
Names like Sue Wicks and June Olkowski in basketball, Judy Melick in swimming, Renee Clark in field hockey and softball, and Mary Ann McChesney in gymnastics are well-known to scores of Rutgers students and fans.
The winning tradition began in the earliest years when the swimming program, coached by the legendary Frank Elm, recorded a 20-2 season and won the 1976 Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (EAIAW) championship, and continued in basketball, which was a national power under Theresa Grentz from the '70s to the '90s.
Basketball, in fact, has been the most visible manifestation of success in the women's program, starting off with a 76-60 win over Princeton in the new program's very first game in 1974.
Grentz's dynasty began in 1976, when she was named the first full-time women's basketball coach in the nation, and lasted until 1994, when Rutgers advanced to the NCAA Tournament for the ninth straight season and posted its ninth straight 20-plus-win season.
A new era began as C. Vivian Stringer won her first game, an upset of No. 7 Penn State, 69-67, and her first Big East game, a 71-64 win over Providence.
A crowd of 7,793 packed the Louis Brown Athletic Center to watch the University of Connecticut take on the Scarlet Knights in 1996, the first advance sellout for a Rutgers women's basketball game. Last year, the Scarlet Knights compiled a 22-10 record and advanced to the NCAA Sweet Sixteen.
The Rutgers sellout, in fact, reminded Stringer of an earlier crowd that symbolized, for her, the growth of women's intercollegiate sports over the years.
"I could never have imagined the transition in women's sports that has taken place from the time I couldn't play basketball in high school because it didn't have a team, to the time when we had a crowd of 22,157 watch my Iowa team play Ohio State."
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