Ivy@50

Tosh Forde
More than a decade ago, she came to Columbia and helped turn the fortunes of the women's soccer program. Now Tosh Forde is back in school in New York, and celebrating the Lions' first Ivy championship.

Recently Elizabeth "Tosh" Forde received a phone call from her parents in Needham, Mass. An overnight letter had arrived from Columbia University. Should they open it?

The letter was an invitation to join the inaugural class of Columbia University's Athletics Hall of Fame. "I was completely surprised," she remembers.

Forde was in pretty heady company. Not only would she be inducted with NFL All-Pro Marcellus Wiley and Olympic Gold Medal swimmer Cristina Teuscher, but this first group of honorees also would include Columbia icons Lou Gehrig and Eddie Collins, both baseball Hall of Famers, and NFL Hall of Famer Sid Luckman. "It's the most honored I've ever been in my life," says Forde.

Forde's journey to the Hall of Fame from Needham began early. "I was obsessed [with sports,]" she recalls. "I played soccer from the time I was five years old. I went to my neighbor's game and came home and begged my mom to sign me up."

At age 12 Forde met her future Columbia coach, Kevin McCarthy (then a Columbia assistant coach), at a soccer camp. A heavily recruited player, when it came time to choose a college, McCarthy convinced her to come to Columbia. "I made my choice of Columbia because of Kevin," she says, "I had faith in him making Columbia good, knowing that we could build something there."

Columbia's women's soccer program started League play in 1986, but had won only three League games in eight seasons when McCarthy took over before the 1994 season. The team improved significantly that first season to a 6-8 overall record. Forde's arrival in 1995 was anticipated as a key to additional success. With "a wealth of talented freshmen -- including high school All-America Tosh Forde -- Columbia appears ready to make its mark in Ivy League play," noted the Columbia Record.

Forde delivered. In 1996 she led the Ivy League with 17 goals and 47 points (also Columbia records), as the Lions compiled a 12-5-1 record, the team's first winning record. Then as a senior co-captain in 1998, Forde led Columbia to its first-ever Ivy winning season and a record 12-2-5 overall mark. "It was very satisfying," remembers Forde. "We didn't have a lot of dynamic talent, but we had great team drive and chemistry. Everyone was 100 percent committed."

Over her career Forde set several Columbia records, including career goals (30), career assists (26) and career points (86). In recognition of her achievements, Columbia awarded her the Connie S. Maniatty Outstanding Senior Student-Athlete Award in 1999.

After graduation Forde, a history major as an undergraduate, worked as a consultant in change management and leadership innovation for Arthur Anderson in Los Angeles. She then played professional soccer, coached the Massachusetts Premier Soccer's Boston Renegades reserve team, and worked in community and business relations for the team.

"I wanted to go back to business school," says Forde, who is now a second-year MBA student at New York University's Stern School of Business. She has already accepted a position at Credit Suisse after graduation in 2007, providing strategic advising to corporations.

Forde had a tremendous career at Columbia, but perhaps more important was the transformation in the women's soccer team that she helped bring about. Before she arrived the team had an overall winning percentage of .264; during her career that figure more than doubled to .535, and the team has continued to play well in what is one of Division I's most competitive women's soccer leagues.

Just weeks ago, McCarthy's team won its first-ever Ivy championship.

Tosh Forde's decision to attend Columbia and play soccer prepared her for personal achievement after graduation. But it also made a difference for Columbia, laying the foundation for her team's continuing success a decade later.

Ed. note - Columbia?s women?s soccer prospects were also assisted greatly by Tosh Forde?s teammate, Liz Cheung ?98. Playing defense, Cheung was three-time All-Ivy, including first team All-Ivy in 1997, and was named by Columbia to the Ivy League?s Silver Anniversary Team in 1999.

— Stephen Eschenbach

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This website will be hosting a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of formal Ivy League competition, featuring special articles every weekday through the end of May 2007.

Although some League rivalries predate the Civil War, and the term 'Ivy League' was used in newspapers as early as the mid-1930s, the Ivy League began formally with the Ivy Presidents' agreement of 1954, and the first year of formal competition was 1956-57.

The first formal Ivy League contest -- on Sept. 29, 1956, when the Columbia Lions' football team hosted the Brown Bears at Baker Field in upper Manhattan -- will be commemorated at that same site (now Wien Stadium) with a ceremony on Saturday, September 30, when Columbia hosts the Princeton Tigers.

Since that first contest, more than 75,000 Ivy athletes have played under a unique model of college sports, sharing a remarkably consistent goal: to provide successful athletics as an integral part of the full undergraduate experience -- combining the values and lessons of athletics with those of the classroom and laboratory, the campus and the community -- to produce leaders in every walk of life.

The 50th Celebration is not intended as a formal or complete history of each era, sport or school in the last half century. There's simply too much history to be able do that -- although the online Ivy League Record Book provides a wealth of information about Ivy League standings and All-Ivy teams, national successes in every sport, and individual athletic and academic achievements.

Rather, the Celebration will ask more than 200 former Ivy League athletes to tell the story of Ivy athletics through an almost-daily series of interview-based profiles. Combined with more comprehensive theme-based features (such as the Ivy League's long Olympic history), these profiles will cover every part of these 50 years at all eight schools -- all of the more than 30 Ivy women's and men's championship sports (the broadest collegiate athletic participation in the country) -- and the incredibly diverse backgrounds and careers of Ivy athletes.

Some of these alumni were stars or champions. Others -- like most athletes at every level of competition -- played more anonymously or with only modest team success. In their combined athletic and academic Ivy League experiences, however, each of them found values and habits that led to later success, whether in global arenas or in their own families and neighborhoods.

Special aspects of the Celebration will include:

a preview of each week's stories in the weekly Ivy League email newsletter, which is available free of charge on the left hand side of this page, beneath the menu. Just simply place your email address in that box and select 'GO.'
an earlier (preceding Friday) preview for members of the media, Ivy Sports Information Directors and other Ivy institutional staff (media may sign up by writing to Jane Antis).
archiving of all profiles and features on www.ivy50.com, chronologically as well as by both school and sport.

We welcome reprinting of all stories, with appropriate credit, in public media, and in all institutional media (including websites, weekly bulletins and calendars, game programs, and alumni magazines).

The Ivy League 50th Celebration will be Co-Edited by Ivy League Associate Director Brett Hoover and by Stephen Eschenbach, a long-time contributor to each of the Ivy alumni magazines who also will be Senior Writer. Other contributing writers will include two-time Olympian and 1990 Harvard graduate Meredith Rainey Valmon; former Ivy Public Information Assistants Josi Carlson and E.J. Crawford; current Ivy Public Information Assistants Wes Harris and Bethany Karantonis; and Ivy League Executive Director Jeff Orleans and Associate Director Chuck Yrigoyen.

We hope you will enjoy this special year-long Ivy feature, and we look forward to reading your comments and answering your questions, which can be sent to Hoover.