Ivy@50

Ellie Daniel
Even though she had won three Olympic medals as a high schooler, when star swimmmer Ellie Daniel enrolled at Penn she hadn't been recruited as an athlete... by any college coach.

Ellie Daniel, a 1976 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and one of the Ivy League's winningest Olympians, credits learning to swim at the relatively late age of 11 with helping her make the decision on her own that it was something she really wanted to do. A few years later, when she went with her father to watch the National AAU championships in Philadelphia, near her hometown of Abington, Pa., the die was cast.

"You know how kids are hero-worshippers?" she was quoted as saying in the May 1973 Pennsylvania Gazette. "Well, I decided right then that I was going to be like them. I was going to be an Olympic medal-winner."

That determination took her through years of training with Philadelphia's renowned Vesper Boat Club, starting out with the B team ? which meant swimming in what she calls "a dump" at the aquarium, underneath the art museum. A year later, she was promoted to the A team, which practiced at the University of Pennsylvania's Weightman Hall pool and was coached by Mary Kelly (then the wife of Jack, brother of Princess Grace of Monaco).

After only one year, Daniel came in eighth in the National AAU 1,500-meter freestyle, but after that, she switched to the butterfly ? and won seven national championships. Daniel says the butterfly came easily for her because she's double-jointed in her back and her strength is in her shoulders.

After winning two gold medals in the 1967 Pan American Games (in the 100-meter butterfly and 400-meter medley relay), Daniel went to her first Olympics ? the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. There, she won a gold medal in the 400-meter medley relay, a silver medal in the 100-meter butterfly, and a bronze medal in the 200-meter butterfly.

By the standards of the 1990s, it is startling that, with Daniel's pre-college accomplishments, not a single coach at any university recruited her. Going to Penn seemed natural for her, however, because she'd been training there since she was 14 and found it a conducive environment for continuing her swimming. She liked that "it was close to Vesper, I could get a good education, and I felt I was part of the school already."

Because the Games began in mid-October, Daniel had to wait until the following September before becoming a Penn freshman, where she decided upon a double major in psychology and elementary education. At Penn, she trained with both the men's and women's swim teams, but then took 14 months off to prepare for the 1972 Olympic Summer Games, to be held in Munich. There, she swam under her world mark by two full seconds in the 200-meter butterfly, winning the bronze medal in the midst of a record-setting race, and came in sixth in the 100-meter butterfly.

Although Daniel had starred for the Penn women's swim squad in 1970 and 1971, she decided at that point to retire from competitive swimming. She felt she wanted to have time for some activities in her life other than swimming, and she liked the idea of going out on top. "My father always said," she recalls, "'Better to leave the party at the middle and to remember it at its best than to wait around.'"

Now a deputy district attorney with Los Angeles County, Daniel served on the United States Olympic Committee from 1977 through 1980 and on the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee from 1979 through 1984. She was a member of the Penn Hall of Fame's inaugural class a decade ago.

And she says of her own Olympic experiences: "I'd love to do it again. It gets in your blood. The only trouble is that it goes by too fast. It's such a high. You say, 'Wow, was I really there!' Being an Olympian ? that will stay with you always. Even though the public forgets, you have your own self-satisfaction."

This story was originally published in Silver Era, Golden Moments, the 25th Anniversary celebration book of women's athletics in the Ivy League.

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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.