Women’s sports teams have won 22 conference championships for Richmond in the past six years.
In the 1980s, when Richmond swimmer Sue Wager, W’87, was setting records and winning conference championships, a student in the dining hall posed a deflating question that Wager remembers all too well.
“You mean we actually have a women’s swim team?”
Today, female student-athletes are better known on campus and beyond, thanks to more funding and greater emphasis on women’s sports at Richmond. Swimmer Jessica Witt, ’08, earned all-American honors the past two seasons, and teammate Lauren Beaudreau, ’09, has qualified for the 2008 U.S. Olympic trials. Spider swimmers have won the Atlantic 10 Conference championship six years running, and coach Matt Barany has been voted A-10 coach of the year in each of his first two seasons.
“I am absolutely thrilled at the accomplishments of the UR swimmers,” says Wager, a commodities trader in New York and a member of the Richmond Athletics Hall of Fame. “I actually got a chance to meet Matt and the girls last year, and I must say I was extremely impressed with the girls’ dedication and enthusiasm.”
The swimmers were equally impressed by Wager. In the past few seasons, they have shattered every school record except one: Wager’s 200 freestyle time of 1:50.80 in 1986. The team was thrilled to meet the Spider they could not beat.
The field hockey team has “a huge competitive heart and drive to win,” says LaRee Sugg, assistant athletic director.
‘We want to win’
Richmond’s female student-athletes are enjoying unprecedented success, winning 22 conference championships in the past six years. The University claimed four A-10 titles last season—all in women’s sports—and the number of female athletes earning all-American honors has hit an all-time high.
Reasons for the success vary from team to team, but there are several common denominators. First and foremost, give credit to the student-athletes, says LaRee Sugg, assistant athletic director and senior woman administrator. “From our swimmers, who get up at 5 a.m. nearly every morning to practice, to our field hockey team, which has a huge competitive heart and drive to win, all of our women display a wonderful competitive spirit.”
LaRee Sugg
Other factors include coaching, recruiting and migrating to the A-10 conference, but the biggest advantage has been a philosophical change that occurred in 1998, when the University restructured its athletics program to bolster women’s sports. Richmond went from awarding 103 athletic scholarships to men and 39 to women in 1997–98 to awarding 84 to men and 84 to women two years later. The scholarship totals vary, but last year 45 percent of Richmond’s varsity athletes were women.
Women’s sports have fared better under Title IX, the federal law that requires universities to provide equal athletic opportunities for men and women. But Title IX compliance varies widely, and in the early 1980s, the U.S. Department of Education threatened to investigate UR for dragging its feet. More than two decades later, the University’s attitude toward women’s sports has changed significantly.
“A lot of schools just say, ‘OK, what’s the minimum we have to do?’” says Jim Miller, Richmond’s athletic director. “We don’t look at Title IX as some sort of burden. … We want our women to be successful. We want to win.”
And that’s exactly what Richmond’s women have done. “The University of Richmond has been a very welcome addition to the Atlantic 10 in all of its sports, but its excellence in women’s programs is especially noteworthy,” says A-10 Commissioner Linda Bruno. “It is clearly an institution that recognizes the importance of offering a quality experience to all its male and female student-athletes.”
Fanny’s footsteps
The history of women’s athletics at the University goes back to 1914, when the legendary Fanny Crenshaw became Westhampton College’s first athletic director. She pioneered the notion of female students playing sports. But in her first year on campus, Westhampton’s athletic facilities were limited to a single basketball and “the great outdoors,” Crenshaw recalled in a 1975 interview.
She taught physical education and coached basketball, field hockey and other sports for more than 40 years, and she laid the foundation for the women’s sports program. She was the first woman inducted into the Richmond Athletics Hall of Fame.
Fanny Crenshaw
Fanny Graves Crenshaw was the mother of women’s sports at Richmond. She was recruited to start an athletics program at Westhampton by May Keller, the college’s first dean, who wanted her students to stay physically fit so they could study harder.
Crenshaw taught and coached with a distinctive zeal from 1914 until she retired in 1955.
“She didn’t have to retire, but the story goes that she said when she could no longer climb the rope to the top of Keller Hall gymnasium, it was time for her to retire,” said Jane Thorpe Stockman, W’58, in the spring 1985 issue of this magazine. But, Stockman added, “At age 65, she could outrun us all.”
Crenshaw was among the first people to introduce field hockey to Virginia, and Richmond’s hockey field is named in her honor.
In the 1922 Web, a student wrote: “The first time you laid eyes on ‘Fanny G.,’ she was probably swinging a hockey stick with a force that made you tremble for the life of those in front of her. She goes into everything with the same force and skill with which she swings that stick.”
The 1980s brought outstanding athletes such as Deborah Snagg, W’81, an all-American cross country runner, and the members of coach Peg Hogan’s synchronized swimming team that won second-place in the U.S. Collegiate Championships in 1988. Hogan coached nine all-Americans during her 24-year tenure.
But no female athlete left a greater mark than runner Josephine White Menk, W’85, who was a seven-time all-American. She won the national championship in the 1,000-meter run in 1981 with a record time of 2:43.33. Two years later, she set the NCAA record in the indoor mile at 4:31. She also finished as high as second in the national cross-country championships.
“When I first came to America, I wondered, ‘What’s all-American?’” says the British-born Menk, who now lives in Montpelier, Va. “Then I found out what a big deal it was and what an honor. It was really after I graduated that I realized, ‘Wow! That was really good what I did.’”
Despite Menk’s many individual achievements, one of her fondest memories is the distance medley team that finished a surprising second in the 1982 national indoor championships. The night before the race, the team—Alyson Hendricks Honrath, W’85, Patty Thoman Latessa, W’83, Melissa Mullett Young, W’85, and Menk—watched Chariots of Fire, the Oscar-winning film about two British sprinters.
“We were so motivated we could barely sleep,” Menk recalls.
Menk ran the anchor leg (one mile) and made up considerable ground. As she passed other runners, she remembers her teammates “jumping up and down on the sideline, cheering.” (Read more about Josephine White Menk.)
Game, set, match
In 1982, the women’s tennis team won the AIAW Division II title, Richmond’s only team national championship in any sport. Sharon Dunsing, W’83, led that group, winning the singles title at the national tournament and pairing with Martha Puryear Beddingfield, W’84, to win doubles, too.
Dunsing, a walk-on starter for four years, said a couple of partial scholarships were available to team members, but most of the players received no financial assistance. She also said the team operated largely in anonymity with most people on campus seeming “unaware or disinterested in our success.”
“At the time, it was still a man’s world, on and off the field,” she says. “The climate was beginning to change since this was the era of Title IX, and there was a lot of discussion and media attention to equal rights for female athletes. However, I think most of us felt that we were playing for ourselves and our teammates.”
Dunsing now works as a senior insurance examiner with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission in Richmond. She considers herself and her teammates “pioneers of women’s athletics” at the University.
“It has been a slow and continuing process,” she says, “and many other female scholar-athletes have contributed to our goal of acceptance by the school and our community over the past 25 years.”
Today, the women’s tennis team competes in NCAA Division I and is a perennial A-10 power, winning five of the past six conference championships. The team’s No. 1 player, Pamela Duran, ’09, was named the A-10’s most outstanding performer last season. She also qualified for the NCAA singles championships, the first Spider to do so in seven years.
Coach Mark Wesselink has coached the women’s tennis team for 16 seasons since arriving from Harvard, where he had been an assistant coach. “I came to Richmond … because the athletic department was so supportive of women’s tennis,” Wesselink says. “I think, having won a Division II national championship, the school felt that we could be successful at a high level in tennis.”
Wesselink has led the Spiders to the NCAA tournament seven times in the past 11 years and has been voted A-10 coach of the year four times in a row.
“The move to the Atlantic 10 has been largely a positive one for us,” he says. “Fortunately, we have been able to maintain our rivalries with the stronger Colonial Athletic Association teams while competing in the new conference. That allows us to keep our strong schedule with a number of nationally ranked teams and get a great preparation for our A-10 championships.”
A-10 domination
The University’s move to the Atlantic 10 Conference has benefited women’s sports at Richmond, none more than swimming.
“The move from the CAA to the A-10 allowed swimming to really prosper,” says Barany, who succeeded Matt Kredich, coach of four A-10 championship teams.
From the left: Jessica Witt, ’08, C.J. Pisano, ’09, Megan Benner, ’06, Megan Riley, ’07, Holly Hinds, ’07, and Caitlin Geary, ’07, celebrate another victory.
The Spiders swim against Big East and Atlantic Coast Conference teams—outfits Barany refers to as “the big dogs”—to prepare themselves for the A-10 meet and the NCAA championships. The strategy works well. Last season, Witt and Beaudreau qualified for the NCAA championships
Witt, who grew up in Huntington Beach, Calif., chose Richmond after considering Nebraska, Minnesota, Rutgers, Notre Dame and Northwestern.
In some ways, she wonders what
she missed on the “big-school scene,” but swimming for Richmond is a good fit.
Witt says she is motivated by her scholarship, her friends on the team and her love for the sport. She, Beaudreau and two other teammates—Katie Sieben, ’10, and Alex Helland, ’10—spent the summer on campus, going to class and training six days a week.
“Those four could not be more different,” Barany notes. “The common denominator is they all want to get better.”
Witt and Beaudreau are from California. Sieben is from Connecticut, and Helland hails from Texas. They represent the
program’s recruiting reach, which enabled Kredich and now Barany
to attract top swimmers.
Sieben was looking for a school with “a good balance between academics and swimming, and Richmond seemed like a good fit.” Helland picked Richmond over Kansas. “I loved the campus and the girls on the team,” she says. They both also noted that swimming for a small team gives them more individual coaching.
“Where else are you going to get a great degree, win a conference championship and hopefully make the NCAA championships?” Barany asks. “That’s a great college career.”
Lacrosse star Mandy Friend, ’09, takes the field.
Recruiting edge
Lacrosse coach Sue Murphy jokes that when she brings recruits to campus, she does not need to say anything. “The campus sells itself.”
When Murphy came to Richmond, she took over a program that had not won more than five games in a season since 1958. She also inherited a talented group of players and brought two transfers from Boston University, where she had built a nationally ranked program from scratch.
In six seasons at Richmond, her teams have won three A-10 titles and made three NCAA tournament appearances. Two seasons ago, the Spiders beat perennial power Virginia, a win that catapulted Richmond into the top 10 nationally.
The Spiders have benefited from players such as Mandy Friend, ’09, who has earned all-American honors the past two seasons. Last spring, she broke the Richmond record for most points in a season (77), a mark she had established during her rookie year. She followed her sister, Ashley, ’07, to Richmond, choosing the school because of “the coach, the quality of education and the atmosphere of the campus.”
The support system among teammates and other Richmond athletes serves student-athletes well, Murphy says. She also praises faculty and staff members for supporting the lacrosse team.
“I see professors [at games], I see deans,” Murphy says. “I think the girls feel really empowered by that and feel like they’re important. That’s a great feeling. You don’t find that everywhere.”
The field hockey team wins the A-10 … again … and again … and again.
It’s the same way for the field hockey team, which has won five consecutive A-10 championships and made five straight NCAA tournament appearances. Last season’s team was ranked in the top 20 nationally. The team has been led by standouts such as Allie Howard, ’06, and Holly Cram, ’06, who earned all-American honors in 2004. Howard also was the first field hockey player to win three straight Player of the Year awards in the A-10.
Championships beget more championships as Richmond continues to recruit top players for all of its women’s teams. The new recruits cite the same reasons for choosing Richmond that attracted their predecessors—strong academics, beautiful campus, supportive teammates and a winning attitude.
“This is the type of school that is very attractive to women nationally,” says Miller, the athletic director, “and we’ve taken advantage of that.”
Bill Lohmann is a writer and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
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