Ivy@50

Ivy Women's Hockey
As women's ice hockey has emerged onto the nation and world stages, the Ivy League and its athletes have been front and center -- first as pioneers; then as Olympic medalists by the dozens.

1964 -- Brown men's coach Jim Fullerton arranged for Nancy Schieffelin '67, an experienced hockey player disguised in full uniform, to join a team practice and show the men's team how well a woman could play.

1965-66 -- Brown University forms the nation's first intercollegiate women's hockey program. Known as the Pembroke Pandas, they were forced to hold practices at inconvenient hours, borrow equipment from intramural supplies, and sell hockey rule sheets at men's games to raise funds for sticks, pucks and shin guards. Their first game was a 4-1 loss to the Walpole Brooms in February 1966.

1971 -- Cornell starts its women's hockey program. Its earliest recorded game is a 4-3 win over Scarborough in 1972. They would finish their season 4-4 but lose twice to Brown.

1975 -- On December 9 Yale's new women's hockey team played its first-ever game against Choate-Rosemary Hall, a 5-3 win. The program would achieve varsity status in 1977.

1976 -- Brown hosts the first Ivy League women's ice hockey tournament, won by Cornell, with Princeton and Yale also participating.

1978 -- Dartmouth plays its first game January 7 with a 6-5 win at Middlebury, for a season record of 7-7-1 its first season (1-3-1 Ivy).

1978-79 -- Harvard begins varsity play with a 17-0 loss to Providence, and would follow up with a 2-1 loss to Yale.

1979 -- Princeton plays its first varsity game November 24, against Penn.

1982 -- Princeton breaks Cornell's run of six straight league titles, and would go on to win five more to the present day.

1983 -- Ivy women's hockey changes from a league tournament to round robin competition.

1987 -- Cornell's Megan Shull begins play for the Big Red. Shull would stop playing the next season due to injury but go on to become a renowned children's author, most notably of the "Skye O'Shea" American Girl series.

1987 -- Mollie Marcoux comes to Princeton. In her four years Marcoux will earn twelve letters in hockey, soccer, and lacrosse, and still ranks among Princeton's all-time hockey scoring leaders. Marcoux is currently Vice-President for New Business/Strategic Planning for Manhattan's Chelsea Piers Recreation and Entertainment Complex.

1990 -- Dartmouth's Judy Parish Oberting is named to the first U.S. National Team. Oberting, who was named by Dartmouth to the Ivy League's Silver Anniversary Team in 1999, later coached the Dartmouth's women's hockey team.

1998 -- Laurie Belliveau of Yale and Dartmouth's Sarah Hood are named first team All-Americans, the first Ivy women's hockey players to gain this honor.

1998 -- Women's hockey is added to the Olympics for the first time, and 11 Ivy athletes play at Nagano. Seven players are on the gold medal-winning U.S. team, including Harvard's Sandra Whyte Sweeney, while two win silver with Canada. Brown's Chie Chie Sakura played for Japan.

1998 -- USA Hockey creates the Patty Kazmaier award, "given to the most outstanding player in women's NCAA ice hockey each season." The award honors Princeton's Patty Kazmaier, a four year letter winner who earned All-Ivy League Honorable Mention honors as a freshman, was named to the All-Ivy League Second Team in both her sophomore and junior season, and made All-Ivy League First Team and the All-Eastern College Athletic Conference First Team as a senior. She was also the Ivy League Most Valuable Player in 1986. Kazmaier, daughter of Princeton's 1951 Heisman Trophy winner Dick Kazmaier, passed away from a rare blood disorder in 1990. Harvard's A.J. Mleczko won the 1999 award, and Ivy Leaguers would go on to capture five of the first nine awards, with Harvard's Jen Botterill the only double winner, in 2001 and 2003.

1999 -- With a 33-1 record, Harvard wins the AWCHA (American Women's College Hockey Alliance) national championship.

2001 -- The Ivy League sends two teams, Harvard and Dartmouth, to the first NCAA Women's Hockey "Frozen Four" Championship. Since then Ivy schools would appear in finals games in 2002-05. Harvard came the closest to winning a championship with a double-overtime 3-2 loss to Minnesota-Duluth in 2003.

2002 -- The Ivy presence on women's Olympic hockey teams increases to 13 as all medal with the gold medal-winning Canadian team, with six Ivy players, and the silver medal-winning U.S. team, with seven players.

2004 -- Harvard's Nicole Corriero sets a still-standing NCAA record with 59 goals scored in a season.

2004 -- Princeton's Laura Halldorson, a two-time first team All-Ivy forward for the Tigers in the mid-1980s, coaches the University of Minnesota to the NCAA title.

2005 -- Harvard's Angela Ruggerio, a three-time Olympic medal winner, becomes the first female non-goalie in North America to play professionally, competing for the Central Hockey League's Tulsa Oilers.

2006 -- The 2006 Torino Games saw Ivy women at their most dominant, with 20 Ivy players participating in the hockey tournament. Six Ivy Leaguers were on the gold medal-winning Canadian team (coached by Cornell women's coach Melody Davidson) and 11 on the bronze medal-winning American team. Harvard's Angela Ruggerio and Brown's Katie King are on the U.S. team for the third time, while Harvard's Jennifer Botterill and Brown's Becky Kellar repeat the feat for Canada. In addition Ivy women played for Germany and Switzerland.

— 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.