Remembering the
Within the 120-year life span of Barnard College, the history of the teams called the Barnard Bears fills only an eight-year period from 1975 to 1983. Therefore, the story of the Barnard’s intercollegiate athletics program may be unknown to most of our alumnae. But for those of us who were there, what a wonderful time it was. At its peak, before the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium created a program for all Morningside Heights undergraduate women to share, Barnard Intercollegiate Athletics consisted of eight varsity sports: archery, basketball, cross country, fencing, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, and volleyball. The program was short on funding, even shorter on facilities, but incredibly long in determination, passion, and feminism. Its accomplishments and wellorganized infrastructure made it the natural springboard from which to begin Columbia’s women’s program after Columbia College decided to go coeducational. Now the consortium is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and the athletes who wore Barnard Bear uniforms are reflecting on their role in the consortium’s success. “We built such a great foundation for what was to come,” says former Barnard tennis team captain Valerie Schwarz Mason ’80. The birth of the Barnard program mirrored what occurred on college campuses across the country in the early 1970s. After the turbulent antiwar ’60s gave way to the “Women’s Lib” era ’70s, college women sought opportunities to participate in sports at a more competitive level than physical-education classes and intramural sports. The Educational Amendments of Photos from Barnard’s Archives show College athletes before and after the Consortium: 1 tennis-player Yale Stockwell ’68; 2 basketball star Ulana Lysniak ’87; 3 runner Ylonka Wills ’84; 4 and an unidentified golfer practicing her swing on the roof of Barnard Hall.
1972 that included Title IX gave women a spectacular weapon to instigate change. The law mandated that spending on all educational programming in any institution receiving any federal funding must be made proportionally equal to the malefemale ratio of the student body. For instance, if 35 percent of a school’s students were female, roughly 35 percent of its funding for athletics should be spent on its women’s teams. The assorted measures of compliance have been debated and contested over the years, but there is no question that Title IX has had a dramatic impact on women’s and girls’ opportunities in sports. At Barnard, students lobbied for an intercollegiate program, and the administration responded by funding its first three teams in the 1975-76 academic year in basketball, volleyball, and swimming/diving. The choice of these sports evolved out of what were the most advanced, popular physical education classes then, at a time when taking four physical education classes was required of all Barnard students. Two more sports were added the next year, and the remaining three the year after that. “The total budget the first year was $10,000,” recalls Marian Rosenwasser, athletic director from 1975 to 1977 and tennis coach until 1981. “Basketball and volleyball players [shared] the same uniforms because their seasons didn’t overlap, and we had one set of warm-ups for all three sports.” To fill out their teams’ rosters, the coaches, who also taught phys-ed classes, would recruit the more gifted women from their classes or scroll through the extracurricular-interests cards of incoming first-years. The vast majority of athletes were not recruited to attend Barnard via written correspondence and phone calls while they were in high school (as most other Continued on Page 73 Barnard Magazine Spring 2009 25