Spurring sports without a budget

The first female Tigers broke into intercollegiate athletics at Princeton largely thanks to the pioneering work of Merrily Baker, who started the women’s sports program following the advent of coeducation at the University in 1969.

“In the beginning, it was me and 200 women,” she recalled of her arrival in 1970 as associate director of athletics and director of physical education. “I had no coaches. I had no budget. I had no equipment. I had no facilities. I had nothing, because they didn’t expect women to be competing [on a varsity level] in five years.”

But thanks to Baker’s efforts, Princeton women competed in intercollegiate athletics — within her first three weeks in the role.

Over five years, Baker’s programming progressed from women’s physical education classes to intramural sports, culminating in the first intercollegiate games.

Not only did Baker exceed these goals, she was also inspired to dedicate her life’s work to bringing gender equality to athletics.

“I did not want [my daughters] to go through ... the deprivation of opportunity that I had,” Baker explained. “I wanted the playing field to be more level for women.”

When Baker arrived, Princeton did not have any women’s athletics infrastructure.

She began by enrolling all women in physical education and launching five women’s sports: tennis, field hockey, swimming, basketball and squash. She believed in women’s full participation in the Princeton athletic scene — even the rough-and-tumble Cane Spree, the first intramural sport to include women.

“I can’t conceive of any reason why there shouldn’t be mixed play,” she told The Daily Princetonian in Sept. 1970 when students began campaigning for a female division of the fall tradition.

Two weeks later, two female students expressed an interest in representing Princeton at the Eastern Intercollegiate Tennis Championship in New Paltz, N.Y. Baker bought shirts from the University store, ironed the students’ names onto them and drove the students to New York.

The students’ enthusiasm and Baker’s support paid off: One student took first, the other second, and the pair won the doubles team trophy, an auspicious start for women’s intercollegiate athletics for Princeton, Baker reminisced fondly.

Many of the first women athletes said they found Baker’s enthusiasm infectious.

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“She was positive, enthusiastic and had a clear vision for achieving equality in coaching, facilities and support for women’s sports,” said Sue Perles ’75, a member of the first field hockey team and also Princeton’s first female Rhodes Scholar.

Perles confessed that when she was admitted, she was not sure if she would be able to continue field hockey seriously at Princeton. When she got to her first practice, however, she saw that Baker and the upperclassmen had done a terrific job over the previous summer, setting up schedules and getting ready for a new team. Their enthusiasm convinced Perles that the team was ready to succeed.

Yet the team did not have much financial support. Uniforms came courtesy of the cheerleading squad, and the women practiced on Poe Field, usually a soccer field, after getting carpenters to build two goalposts for field hockey.

Baker also worked behind the scenes on women’s behalf. Otto von Keinbusch, Class of 1906, was a staunch opponent of coeducation in the late 1960s. But one evening, then-president William Bowen GS ’58 sent Baker to Keinbusch’s house in New York for dinner. Keinbusch was so impressed with the success of women’s athletics that he sent Baker home with a check for $10,000, Baker said. He later became one of the greatest benefactors of women’s athletics.

While Baker worked with alumni, the teams worked to woo spectators. In 1971, the women’s field hockey team was the University’s sole winning team at a Yale tournament. Then, Baker recalled, women athletes realized that winning games was their way to winning hearts.

By the mid-1970s, Princeton had amassed an enviable record in women’s athletics. The tennis team had not lost a single match in their first five years. In field hockey, Princeton was the Ivy League Champion. This success, combined with better facilities, helped attract more skilled players to the team, Perles said.

But gender inequality remained. After a field hockey game at another university in Pennsylvania, Baker recalled, the team went into the locker room to shower.

Baker was soon informed that the school didn’t provide towels for women. “I had 22 women on my team who had to pat themselves dry with paper towels before they could get dressed,” Baker explained.

This experience “yanked” Baker toward her true calling of working for equality in women’s athletics, she said. Though she had pursued athletics as a varsity college player and as the first director of the women’s athletics program at Franklin & Marshall, it was at Princeton that she realized that there was a real need for change, she noted.

Initially, she simply wanted to be a teacher and a coach, but the towel incident “lit some fires” in her “to make the world a better place,” she explained.

It was this passion for change that led her to later accept the offer of women’s athletics director at the University of Minnesota, a Big 10 school, in 1982, she said.

While at Princeton, Baker also served as president for the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the equivalent of the NCAA for women’s sports. After her time in Minnesota, she worked for the NCAA and was the first woman to be hired as an athletics director at a Big 10 school, Michigan State.

“Every opportunity that came was another way for me to tackle a larger arena to create a better environment for women in sports,” Baker said.

In recognition of her work, Baker received the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators’ (NACWAA) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 and was inducted into the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics Hall of Fame in 2006.

“In retrospect, it was amazing to go that far in that short period of time,” Baker said of her Princeton experience. “When you’re in the midst of a journey, you don’t think much about it until after the journey is completed.”

This is the fourth article in a five-part series commemorating the fortieth anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Princeton.