The Century in Sports, continued

Title IX

Women’s sports at Penn dated back to the formation of the Women’s Athletic Association in 1921, though one would have been hard-pressed to divine that fact from reading the Gazette, which covered women’s sports sporadically, if at all. A roundup of women’s team results appeared in the magazine with slightly more regularity in the 1940s, but coverage was still restricted to an occasional photo accompanied by a minimal amount of text.

With the passage of Title IX in 1972, the issue of women’s sports moved into the spotlight. “In the past few years women have struggled to raise their level of consciousness, a goal heartily applauded by men, since it cost nothing,” Alan Richman wrote in March 1975. “Now women athletes want to raise their budgets so they can have the same opportunities as male athletes. This idea is considered far more radical and dangerous by the collective forces of male superiority.” Richman surveyed the Ivy League’s athletic directors and found them unafraid of the new regulations, even though at the time most of them presided over budgets that were tipped heavily toward men’s teams.

“The Ivies as a group are much more advanced in their thinking regarding the development of women’s athletic programs,” Penn athletic director Fred Shabel told Richman. “A key factor here that makes things a lot easier is that, unlike grant-in-aid schools, all students are eligible for financial aid, whether he or she is a clarinetist, a quarterback, or a tennis player.”

Before long, volleyball, gymnastics, fencing, crew, and ice hockey had been added as women’s sports, and Patricia McLaughlin’s 1975 feature story on the Penn field-hockey team noted that The Daily Pennsylvanian had actually begun assigning a reporter to cover that team.

1970s: Decade of Deficits

If mounting defeats preoccupied Penn alumni in the early and mid-1960s, the athletic department’s increasing deficits became a sore spot in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s. “When I receive pleas to increase my Annual Giving, and note that Penn must have had a sports deficit of about what it collects in Annual Giving … I again am filled with doubts as to the wisdom of Penn’s present course,” Arthur E. Conn W’28 wrote in the March 1968 Gazette. “I wonder whether my few dollars and those others give are used for academic purposes or to pay the expenses of maintaining an athletic posture that becomes more revolting to me each year.”

In a lengthy article in October 1970, Bob Savett revealed that the University’s athletic expenditures increased 19 percent from 1955-56 to 1964-65, but 73 percent from 1964-65 to 1968-69, the year Penn teams achieved their highest combined winning percentage of the decade. The money had indeed bought victories, not to mention Gimbel Gym, a synthetic track and Astroturf at Franklin Field, new locker rooms at the Hollenback Center, the Class of ’23 Ice Rink, and an addition to the Ringe Squash Court. Gate receipts had remained the same during those four years, however, and by the spring of 1971, student and faculty complaints about the athletic department’s $1.3 million deficit led President Martin Meyerson Hon’70 to appoint a committee headed by English professor (and former basketball star) John Wideman C’63 Hon’86 to seek solutions. “The faculty has lost control of athletics,” Wideman told the Gazette. “The faculty has minimal input into the Ivy Group or into our internal situation. So, in a financial emergency, there is a complete lack of understanding.”

The debate over the direction of Penn athletics, and the Ivy League in general, continued throughout the 1970s as attendance at sporting events continued to drop. In April 1971, Dolson criticized Penn’s “lust to be number one … [that] was so strong that it overrode everything else, including the principle that the University and league are supposed to stand for.” The possibility of leaving the Ivy League and its restrictive policies was given voice in the May 1977 Gazette, and a piece by Marshall Ledger in February 1978 examined the league’s cozy relationship with the NCAA and found that the Ivies were no longer an island unto themselves, but “have shut up and are playing the game.”

The Final Four and
the Football Renaissance

Inarguably the greatest achievement by a Penn team in the last 25 years was the men’s basketball team’s magical ride to the NCAA Final Four in 1979, and the Gazette’s April issue featured expanded coverage of the games and the reaction on campus. Frank Dolson, on loan from The Philadelphia Inquirer, witnessed the team’s galvanizing effect on the University community and observed, “There are people, more than a few of them at Penn, who habitually downgrade sports, who get so caught up in the academic side of university life that they stick up their noses at athletics … There are unique benefits that can be gained from a realistic, honest, successful sports program.”

In contrast to the basketball team, Penn’s football program was a laughingstock when Jerry Berndt arrived from DePauw University in 1981. In a feature titled, “Can Coach Berndt Do It?” in November 1981, Marshall Ledger captured the intensity and optimism of the man who would lead the Quakers to the first of four consecutive Ivy titles a year later with a stirring victory over Harvard that remains a watershed moment in Penn sports. “I’d like to be remembered as a coach who came in and regained the tradition at Penn,” Berndt was quoted. “I believe that’ll happen. If it doesn’t happen, if our program stays in the doldrums, I’ll get out.”

Today, with a variety of teams enjoying consistent success in the Ivy League and beyond, Penn athletics is hardly in the doldrums. But do the wins and championships foster a sense of complacency? Have the Ivies become indistinguishable from the rest of the schools in the NCAA? Is it realistic to continue banning athletic scholarships? Will Ivy League schools be able to fund athletic programs without cutting more teams? Those and other questions set the agenda for the next generation of college athletes, and give the Gazette some things to ponder as it begins its second century.

David Porter C’82 is the author of Fixed: How Goodfellas Bought Boston College Basketball and writes the regular sports column for the Gazette.

Winning smiles, 1979 and 2001: Tony Price W'79 takes down the net and Coach Bob Weinhauer basks in the glow of a Franklin Field pep rally during Penn's “magical” advance to the NCAA Final Four. Diana Caramanico W’01 (No.23) and teammates raise high the women’s basketball team's first Ivy League Championship trophy.

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Copyright 2002 The Pennsylvania Gazette Last modified 5/02/02