In 1976, fencing and tennis became the first two women’s varsity sports at Notre Dame. Fifty years later, 13 female varsity squads share a legacy that includes 16 national championships, hundreds of All-America honors and dozens of Olympians — achievements accumulated over decades of athletic dedication that created lifetimes of good memories for participants.
At first, involvement in varsity athletics wasn’t an option for Notre Dame women. While it took four years once the University went fully coeducational to form the first varsity teams, for some sports, the wait lasted decades — the most recent addition being women’s rowing in 1998.
In the meantime, Notre Dame women competed at the highest levels they could — mostly in a sprawling array of club sports teams. The club tennis team started things in 1972, followed by rowing and fencing clubs in 1973, and basketball and field hockey clubs a year later. Ellen Hughes ’77, Jane Lammers ’77 and others founded the Women’s Athletic Association in the fall of 1974 to help clubs raise funds, muster faculty support and eventually push for varsity status.
Lammers was a key advocate for growing women’s athletics at Notre Dame because of her connection with athletic director Edward “Moose” Krause ’34, who had coached her father, Paul Lammers ’49, in basketball in the 1940s. She met with Krause on several occasions, first to gain approval for club tennis and eventually to elevate the team to varsity.
“He was concerned about our long hair,” Lammers recalls, referring to an early conversation about how Notre Dame women would be expected to compete. Lammers said she pointed Krause to a male Irish track star with long locks and told him that if a man could do it, so could the women.
Lammers took on manager duties for the club tennis team, calling other Midwestern colleges from her Badin Hall dorm room to set a schedule. After a breakthrough with Valparaiso University, a half-dozen other colleges agreed to visit Notre Dame to play tennis.
Title IX, a landmark gender equity law passed in 1972, led to a dramatic increase in women’s participation in sports at all levels. Before that, girls and women had far fewer opportunities to develop their athletic skills.
Many of Notre Dame’s first female athletes had no prior experience in their chosen sports. Jody Gormley ’77 signed up for rowing at the club fair on a whim. Luckily for her, the team was on square one as well. The fall of 1973 didn’t bring any races or opponents. Gormley says there simply weren’t enough women’s crews in the Midwest to compete with.
That meant they had time to build trust with the men’s rowing staff. One early concern was that women wouldn’t be able to lift the eight-person shells used in the heavyweight races, so 12 women were assigned to carry each one.
The limited number of women in the student body in those early years also meant few were available to advocate for their place in Irish athletics. “My freshman year there were 800 women and 5,000 men,” Gormley recalls. Despite this, she says male and female rowers got along well, sharing a stretch of the St. Joseph River in Mishawaka for early morning practices and traveling together to meets.
Formal competition arrived in spring 1974, when Gormley and others participated in a four-person race against a high school team on Long Island. “It was everyone’s first race,” she says. It took place in a thick fog. Gormley says their boat glided past the finish line unaware, stopping only when the organizers caught up to them to announce they had won.
She embraced the haphazardness of the early years and laughs now about scavenging for food on team trips. During one spring break in Washington, D.C., the women snuck into Trinity College’s dining hall to get butter for their meals.
From 1977 to ’79, Gormley coached women’s rowing when no one else would. She says being an athlete was more fun than coaching, but she wanted to support a group she had come to love.
Sally Duffy, then the rector of Lewis Hall and coach of the women’s club basketball team from 1975 to ’77, recalls no shortage of interest among Notre Dame women in participating. Building talent was another matter.
“Some schools were already starting to bring in women on scholarships . . . and Notre Dame wasn’t there yet,” she says. Men’s basketball coach Digger Phelps was an early supporter, encouraging the idea of a women’s varsity team.
Upsetting Northwestern’s varsity on January 30, 1976, the Notre Dame club team gained respect from legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who came down to the floor to introduce himself and congratulate Duffy.
During the 1976-77 academic year, Notre Dame issued its first monograms to female student-athletes: Mary Shukis Behler ’79 (tennis), Jane Lammers (tennis), Chris Marciniak ’77 (fencing), Catherine Buzard Sazdanoff ’78 (fencing) and Kathy Valdiserri ’78 (fencing).
Sazdanoff spent her first two years on the fencing club before joining the varsity, something she calls an “unexpected treasure.” Before college, her only fencing experience was a high school gym elective. “I don’t count it as really experience because I’m a lefty, and the person who taught fencing did not know how to teach left-handed,” she says. Instead, she attributes her formation to Mike DeCicco ’49, ’50M.S., whose varsity fencing squads won five national championships.
“All of a sudden I’m a part of the Notre Dame sports world, and he and all the coaches treated it and treated us like the football players or the basketball players,” she says. She noted her opponents’ improvement as the years went on. Each season the schedule got tougher as more varsity programs popped up around the country.
As women’s sports blossomed at Notre Dame, their aspirations grew as well. Fencing won the school’s first women’s national title in 1987, followed by soccer in 1995.
Cindy Daws ’97, a co-captain of that 1995 squad, was recruited by many well-established programs before deciding on Notre Dame. Irish women’s soccer had achieved varsity status in 1989. “I came to Notre Dame to help build a program and win a national championship,” she says.
In Daws’ freshman year, the Irish made their first appearance in the NCAA tournament. The next year, the team lost in the championship game to North Carolina, one of the schools that had tried to recruit Daws. When the Irish finally won the national title her junior year, she says, the feeling was “complete, utter excitement and accomplishment.”
Women’s basketball was also growing in the 1990s under head coach Muffet McGraw. Star athletes like center Ruth Riley ’01, ’16MBA, helped pull the team closer to the mountaintop.
Riley’s backstory illustrates changes that had already taken place in girls’ sports. She began her basketball career in the fourth grade, and lettered in basketball, volleyball and track in high school. Growing up in Macy, Indiana, Riley says, Notre Dame was her choice from the beginning. “I liked the aspect of the University that had excellent athletics, academics and faith,” she says.
When she arrived in 1997, the women’s basketball team was coming off its first Final Four. “I probably never worked so hard as I did that freshman year in college,” she says.
That work would not go unnoticed. By the time she graduated, she had won player of the year honors from four major organizations, was a two-time first-team All-American and the Academic All-American of the Year. She also helped earn the 2001 NCAA championship, sinking two game-winning free throws against Purdue to capture the first of two national titles for Irish women’s basketball. Riley called those last moments in an Irish jersey her “storybook ending,” but there was more to come in her career.
After graduation, she was selected in the first round of the WNBA draft by the Miami Sol and later won two professional championships with the Detroit Shock. She also competed in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, winning gold for Team USA, and is now the senior director of team development for the NBA’s Miami Heat.
Other pioneers of women’s sports at Notre Dame have remained active. Since 2012, Gormley has convened Notre Dame alumni rowers to race at the Head of the Charles, a prominent event in Boston. Her “NDames” team is composed mostly of women in their 60s, with the oldest athlete on their roster still competing at age 82.
Others took different paths. Duffy joined the Sisters of Charity, then had a long career as an administrator at a Cincinnati hospital. Today, Sister Sally Duffy, S.C., says she still follows the women’s team religiously and returns to campus occasionally to meet with players young and old.
As Notre Dame celebrates the 50th year of varsity women’s athletics, Gormley, Riley and others are also making their way back to campus to meet old friends. They join thousands of alumnae who, through hard work and a willingness to push boundaries, have earned their place in Notre Dame athletic history.
Gray Nocjar is a junior electrical engineering major with minors in energy studies and journalism. He was this magazine’s fall intern.