Ivy@50

Ivy, 2006-07
As the athlete profile portion of the Ivy@50 celebration has come to an end, Ivy League Executive Director Jeff Orleans takes a look back at the 2006-07 season.

Dear Ivy@50 Readers,

Nine months and more than 200 alumni profiles ago, we began the online celebration of the Ivy League's 50th Anniversary by saying that "we hope that our alumni's own words will tell you not only about their athletic accomplishments, but also about how their involvement in Ivy sports and their Ivy student experiences shaped their later lives and careers."

It's been a real challenge to choose our subjects so as to truly represent the tens of thousands of Ivy League "athlete-alumni" over our five formal decades -- we've had to pass over many more interesting and revealing stories than we could possibly include.

But it's also been a great pleasure to interview our subjects. We've been energized throughout the year by their enthusiastic willingness to remember their experiences, to be a part of this project, and to credit their Ivy experiences with shaping their future careers and lives.

One reason for their instant cooperation is that we've been able to share with them our readers' positive responses to their stories: since we began presenting the 50th anniversary profiles in September, viewership of Ivy websites has increased by 30 percent, to an all-time high of eight million page views per month.

But the main reason for the enthusiasm is their recognition, as they have followed Ivy League teams and athletes this year, that the successes they enjoyed as Ivy League students and athletes continue today — that the Ivy focus on academic, athletic, service and personal accomplishments all at the same time, which shaped their own campus lives, continues to guide Ivy student-athletes, who continue to excel in all those ways.

I also wrote In my introduction in September that "we believe the Ivy model continues to develop the country's most successful student-athlete leaders." In the columns for today and tomorrow we want to illustrate just how the Ivy League heritage does live on in the achievements of today's Ivy athletes. Ivy League team championships and individual honors are decided every year in 33 different sports: every year, traditions of excellence are extended, long-time records are surpassed, and our impressive record of national prominence enhanced — as is the case this weekend, when the Ivy League men's and women's lacrosse champions, Cornell and Penn, will compete for national championships in Final Fours in Baltimore and at Penn's own Franklin Field.

It would be difficult to catalogue every team and individual honor won by the more than 8,000 or so Ivy League student-athletes who have competed in 2006-07. The list of 2006-07 Ivy League team and individual champions at the end of this column shows how widely success has been shared in League competition, and today’s sidebar that brings these statistics to life by identifying one athlete at each school for whom this has been a truly outstanding year.

Ivy League success has extended regionally and nationally as well. With national results in most spring sports still undecided – and with a strong group of Ivy League competitors still seeking those laurels -- two Ivy League teams and five Ivy League individuals already have claimed national championships, with many other elite performances just behind.

The Ivy national team champions are Princeton in women's squash and Dartmouth in NCAA skiing. Individually, Penn wrestler Matt Valenti won his second national title, Harvard's Tim Hagamen and Columbia's Daria Schneider took fencing crowns, and Harvard's Siddharth Suchde and Kyle Grigg took the national championships in men's and women's squash.

Academically, the principal national measure of success is the NCAA's Academic Progress Ratings, and in this arena the Ivy League’s performance is simply dominant. Nearly two-thirds of Ivy League teams were recognized as having APRs in the top 10 percent in their sports nationally (no other conference had more than one-eighth of its teams earn that distinction), and the average Ivy League APR was the nation’s best in 20 of the 27 sports in which at least 10 conferences participate. To personalize these team statistics, note that when CoSIDA releases the final 2006-07 Academic All-District teams today, 20 more Ivy Leaguers will be honored, bring this year’s Ivy honorees to a total of 63.

I hope this summary of Ivy League student-athletes’ accomplishments conveys a sense of how much pride the Ivy League takes in our student-athletes -- and of how confident we are that as graduates they too will contribute to our world as positively as our "profiled" alumni have done. Tomorrow we'll close the 50th Anniversary Celebration with a column that links our past, present and future through a story that began just four years into this first formal Ivy League half-century.

Jeff Orleans, Executive Director

BASEBALL
Champion — Brown Bears
Player of the Year — Devin Thomas, Brown
Pitcher of the Year — Jeff Dietz, Brown
Rookie of the Year — Todd Roth, Penn

MEN'S BASKETBALL
Champion — Penn Quakers
Player of the Year — Ibrahim Jaaber, Penn
Rookie of the Year — Ryan Wittman, Cornell

WOMEN'S BASKETBALL
Champion — Harvard Crimson
Player of the Year — Ashley Taylor, Dartmouth
Rookie of the Year — Melissa Colborne, Yale

MEN'S CROSS COUNTRY
Champion — Princeton Tigers
Individual Champion — Ben True, Dartmouth

WOMEN'S CROSS COUNTRY
Champion — Princeton Tigers
Individual Champion — Lindsay Donaldson, Yale

MEN'S FENCING
Champion — Columbia Lions; Harvard Crimson
National Champions — Tim Hagamen, Harvard

WOMEN'S FENCING
Champion — Columbia Lions
National Champions — Daria Schneider, Columbia

FIELD HOCKEY
Champion — Princeton Tigers
Player of the Year — Paige Schmidt, Princeton
Rookie of the Year — Kaitlyn Perrelle, Princeton

FOOTBALL
Champion — Yale Bulldogs; Princeton Tigers
Player of the Year — Jeff Terrell, Princeton
Rookie of the Year — Austin Knowlin, Columbia

MEN'S GOLF
Champion — Penn Quakers
Individual Champion — Chris Condello, Columbia

WOMEN'S GOLF
Champion — Columbia Lions
Individual Champion — Sara Ovadia, Columbia

MEN'S ICE HOCKEY
Champion — Dartmouth Big Green; Yale Bulldogs
Player of the Year — David Jones, Dartmouth
Rookie of the Year — Sean Backman, Yale

WOMEN'S ICE HOCKEY
Champion — Dartmouth Big Green
Players of the Year — Gillian Apps, Dartmouth; Julie Chu, Harvard
Rookie of the Year — Sarah Parsons, Dartmouth

MEN'S LACROSSE
Champion — Cornell Big Red
Player of the Year — Matt McMonagle, Cornell
Rookie of the Year — Ari Sussman, Dartmouth

WOMEN'S LACROSSE
Champion — Penn Quakers
Player of the Year — Lauren Taylor, Yale
Rookie of the Year — Ali DeLuca, Penn

MEN'S HEAVYWEIGHT ROWING
Champion — Harvard Crimson

MEN'S LIGHTWEIGHT ROWING
Champion — Dartmouth Big Green

WOMEN'S ROWING
Champion — Yale Bulldogs

MEN'S SOCCER
Champion — Harvard Crimson
Player of the Year — Charles Altchek, Harvard
Rookie of the Year — Andre Akpan, Harvard

WOMEN'S SOCCER
Champion — Columbia Lions
Player of the Year — Shannon Munoz, Columbia
Rookie of the Year — Lauren Mann, Harvard

SOFTBALL
Champion — Harvard Crimson
Player of the Year — Annie Kinsey, Penn
Pitcher of the Year — Shelly Madick, Harvard
Rookie of the Year — Lauren Murphy, Harvard

MEN'S SQUASH
Champion — Princeton Tigers
Player of the Year — Mauricio Sanchez, Princeton
Rookie of the Year — Colin West, Harvard

WOMEN'S SQUASH
Champion — Princeton Tigers
Player of the Year — Kyla Grigg, Harvard
Rookie of the Year — Kristen, Lange, Penn

MEN'S SWIMMING & DIVING
Champion — Princeton Tigers
Swimmers of the Meet — Geoff Rathgeber, Harvard; Alex Righi, Yale
Diver of the Meet — Jeff Lichtenstein, Yale

WOMEN'S SWIMMING & DIVING
Champion — Princeton Tigers
Swimmers of the Meet — Alicia Aemisegger, Princeton
Diver of the Meet — Katie Giarra, Princeton

MEN'S TENNIS
Champion — Penn Quakers; Columbia Lions
Player of the Year — Brandon Wai, Yale
Rookie of the Year — Jonathan Wong, Columbia

WOMEN'S TENNIS
Champion — Penn Quakers
Player of the Year — Ekaterina Kosminskaya, Penn
Rookie of the Year — Ekaterina Kosminskaya, Penn

MEN'S INDOOR TRACK & FIELD
Champion — Cornell Big Red
Athlete of the Meet — Muhammad Halim, Cornell

WOMEN'S INDOOR TRACK & FIELD
Champion — Cornell Big Red
Athlete of the Meet — Jeomi Maduka, Cornell

MEN'S OUTDOOR TRACK & FIELD
Champion — Cornell Big Red
Athlete of the Meet — Erison Hurtault, Columbia

WOMEN'S OUTDOOR TRACK & FIELD
Champion — Cornell Big Red
Athlete of the Meet — Jeomi Maduka, Cornell

VOLLEYBALL
Champion — Cornell Big Red
Player of the Year — Elizabeth Bishop, Cornell
Rookie of the Year — Alexis Crusey, Yale

WRESTLING
Champion — Cornell Big Red
Player of the Year — Matt Valenti, Penn
Rookies of the Year — Adam Frey, Cornell; J.P. O'Connor, Harvard

— Jeff Orleans

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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.