Radcliffe Goes on the Power Play

Application for Undergraduate Admission

Name:

Address:

Sports books read in the last week:

Are you over six feet?:

Field hockey experience:

Do you play squash?:

Can you cradle [a lacrosse ball]?:

Way back when--call it 1975--Radcliffe prospectives needed not concern themselves with that section of their applications under the call word "Athletics." Play the violin, ace those SATs, live in Idaho--but be a jock...what are you, sexist?

Times change, though, and so do admissions offices. Witness last year, when Harvard's and Radcliffe's became one, an event that caused as great a shake-up at Byerly Hall as it did around Radcliffe sporting circles.

For given but one year--call it 1976--in which to work, the all-new admissions team managed to rebuild Radcliffe's sweat squads faster than it takes Andy Cadiff to get seconds on shrimp curry.

"It definitely made a difference," Mary Anne Schwalbe '55, director of undergraduate admissions, said yesterday afternoon, referring to the merged admissions office. "We became aware of women's athletics."

So aware, in fact, that more than just a handful of the Radcliffe class of '80 was accepted with last year's athletic marks in mind.

The field hockey outfit had but a single triumph in '75. Change that to a single setback in '76. The hoopsters didn't know where the basket was last year. This winter they rarely miss. Squash is no slouch, soccer and track are up and coming, and three drinks at Father's--on Ladies' Night of course--says the lacrosse team will win more than it loses.

Yet, while the Radcliffe admissions folks now look for jump shots the way they look for cellists, the intensity of their search is mild compared to the womanhunting efforts at Princeton and Yale.

"Here," according to Maura Costin, the Kornelia Ender of the Radcliffe swim team, "the decision is yours. They (the Byerly Hallers) basically say: 'You know what we have to offer. If you take it, fine, if not, that's OK too.' At Princeton, I was taken out to dinner and always received letters and telephone calls from the coach. If I had gone to Princeton, I would have felt like I had to swim." Obviously, this low-key approach (what other approach would be used at Harvard?) works (and not just for athletes. We're here, right?).

Ellen Hart admits that she was more impressed with Princeton and its superior facilities but she's still dribbling away her winter in the IAB.

Jane Fayer was all psyched to spend four years in New Haven until she tired of all the calls from players, coaches and even Biology chairmen. "I was really going to go to Yale," she stated, "but I couldn't stand it after a while. The head of the Biology department used to call and ask me if I had any questions." You guessed it: Fayer's a bio major.

The Byerly Hallers and their scouts aren't deviceless, of course, but one can speak in assured tones of what Schwalbe terms "philosophical differences" in admissions policy between the schools.

There are also performance differences. Radcliffe still remains a year or so and a few six-footers behind its chief rivals in program development, but with new coaches now populating the second floor of the IAB, winning marks now in the record books and aforementioned raised athletic consciousness in Byerly--"We just weren't told about women's athletics before" according to Schwalbe--parity should be reached before this year's freshwomen receive their sheepskins.

Of course, it's still OK for prospective freshwomen to play the violin, ace their SATs, or live in Idaho. Just as long as they don't leave the athletic section of their application blank.