By Nell Mohn '80 

(Please click on photos for an enlarged version.)

I received Lyn's invitation to speak here tonight the day after I had just returned from presenting another talk at Wells about sexual harassment. At first, I chuckled when I saw Lyn's e-mail. Her request seemed so far a field from the weightier, way less playful things I usually talk about, like sexual harassment, careers in the law, your rights as an employee in the workplace. I also had a brief moment of gut-wrenching panic; it's been over two decades since organized sports have been in my life. What could I possibly talk about for 20 minutes? Then, suddenly, myriad thoughts and memories came flooding back about my incredibly rich years spent playing team sports. And soon I knew that the problem was not going to be filling 20 minutes, but knowing when to quit. What kind of story could I tell that would be, I hope, interesting, useful even, maybe, if I were lucky, inspiring? 

So, I thought about this in every spare second over the last few weeks: while I was out walking my cat at night, sometimes talking out loud and scaring my neighbors, and while I was daydreaming out the window at work. What ultimately crystallized for me was an understanding of the many ways in which my participation in women's athletics has been important to me over the entire course of my adult life. So what I'd like to do tonight is present my list of seven items that identify and describe what women's sports have meant to me:

1. THE GAME. I had the good fortune to play both field hockey and basketball in high school and at Wells - at least until the basketball program was discontinued here - and also to participate in track in high school, in particular the 110 meter hurdles and long jump. But because it was the one sport I played the longest and also my connection to Mrs. Maloney that prompted Coach LaBar to invite me to speak tonight, that I'm going to talk about just field hockey for a second, at least with respect to the game.

What I want to describe here are the sensory impressions, the full palate of my own remembered sensations about field hockey. For those of you who play that sport, I think you'll know what I'm talking about; for athletes in other sports, I apologize, but perhaps something similar will strike a chord in you as well.

So for starters, how about the familiar feeling that returns to your butt when you learn once again every fall to bend over in that seemingly, oh-so-unnatural position and stretch those usually sedentary muscles which much prefer sitting down.

How about trundling up that hill, sometimes before breakfast, coffee mug in one hand, stick in the other for an early morning practice, the sleep barely out of your eyes.

The sound of cleats on a hard surface, whether on a newly waxed school floor you weren't supposed to be walking on or on pavement. When I wore cleats, I felt tall, strong. I played field hockey, man. Clickety clack, clickety clack. Look out! Parenthetically, my last pair of cleats somehow mysteriously disappeared from the face of the earth after my years at Wells. My father, bless his heart, who is not clued into sports and loves a clean basement, threw them out one day in a fit of purging the nether regions of the house. When I found out, I felt weak in the knees. What could he possibly have been thinking? His explanation was that they had holes in them. Well, of course! What good pair of used cleats doesn't?! A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into those holes. Never more would I have this keep sake of my former glory days to lug around with me from home to home over the succeeding years until I finally reached my own golden years where I probably wouldn't even recognize what they were anymore and throw them out myself. So, I forgave my dad and got over the melodrama.

What about the sound of field hockey sticks smacking together - ground-stick-ground-stick-ground-stick - as you wait breathlessly, nervously for the contest to finally begin.

The solid thump of a well-hit ball when you know just by the feel and the sound that you have so connected with the pure center of that hard round object that it's gonna drive the straightest possible, pre-ordained trajectory across the universe; unless someone so much as dares to get in the way.

The pain of a stick to your shins when you don't have your shin guards on, they've fallen down, or another player has somehow managed to find the one place on your ankle they just don't cover. Hockey balls to the chest, thighs, midriff, arms; but unless the injuries are serious, you wear the bruises proudly.

The smell of a field hockey stick. Am I nuts, or do they still have that wonderful unique smell? I don't know if it's the wood, the grip material or sometimes the athletic tape you wrap around it to hold it all together - maybe it's all of those things. I love that smell; it's alive, physical, and it's so field hockey. I picked up my stick from high school the other day, which I managed to sort of borrow eternally after my last hockey game for Iroquois Central, and 25 years later that smell is still there, faint, but there.

These are just some of the things I associate with the sound, taste, and feel of field hockey. For each of you, I imagine you have your own set of textures, impressions, and sensations.

2. The second thing that women's athletics has meant to me: STRIVING: whether it be to win, for excellence, to improve yourself. It's a wonderful endeavor to try and get really good at something, and sports and your youth give you the opportunity to do that. To practice, practice, practice over and over again. Like endless foul shots at the end of a long exhausting practice when you can barely lift your arms to your waist, let alone over your head one more time, and the sweat is dripping down your face, salt stinging your eyeballs. It's that feeling you have when you've given your all, when there's nothing left, your whole body aches and tingles from the reaching, the running, trying and striving.

I remember my last field hockey game at Wells which I knew was my last field hockey game ever; the fall of 1979. The game was tied at the end of regulation play, so we went into overtime. Quickly we were able to move the ball into our adversary's end zone. The Wells forward line was knocking on the door, including me, and someone took a shot on goal. I watched the ball blister towards the goal cage, bounce off the goalie's pads, and then, suddenly sucked of all its momentum, dribble at a snail's pace toward the goal line like it was moving in slow motion. I lunged, airborne, landing flat on my stomach, left arm outstretched, the stick extended as much as possible, and I ended up this far from the ball which by then had rolled to a stop smack dab in the middle of the goal line. The goalie's stick came crashing into my left elbow, which immediately grew a golf ball sized lump right in front of my eyes, and I laid there, completely supine, at eye level with the hockey ball, just staring at it, as if time now had completely stopped. I had absolutely no leverage, no way to connect with that ball, which was only a hair's breadth away. to push it the extra half inch. I tried willing it across. But in a split second, somebody else tapped it in. Hooray, we won! I'll admit it, though; I'd be a liar not to. I really wanted it to be me. But in my heart, I knew I had done everything I could, that there was nothing more I could have possibly done in that game, or in that moment.

Carry this over into your life; I'm sure you're doing it already, in sports, in your academics, your other pursuits here, in your life outside of Wells. Continue to strive for excellence, to improve yourself, above all else to be your best. There is never an end to what we can do to better ourselves.

3. SPORTSMANSHIP. Or sportswomanship, if you want. I was happy and probably very lucky to play on teams throughout my eight-year career where sportsmanship mattered, from the top on down. That's because the coaches I had cared more about being decent and playing well instead of winning at any cost, especially the sacrifice of your opponent's (and ultimately your own) dignity. I trust that things are the same at Wells now 20 years later, that you hold out your hand, not only to the other side at the end of the game in the obligatory handshake, but that, during the game, you extend your hand to your opponent when she has fallen down because it's the right thing to do. This is so much bigger than how you conduct yourself on the field or on the court or in the pool. It's a question of who you want to be, who you decide to be.

From where I sit at this point in my life, I often see blatant incivility in the legal profession and growing irresponsibility in the world in general, which makes me sad. I want to know that you guys, your generation, young people, are going to be better. The choice is yours: be a decent athlete and a decent human being.

4. LOSS. I was fortunate to have been spared much personal loss in my childhood, and so organized athletics became an easy way for me to learn what loss is about. I remember a basketball game in my second year at Wells. We were a very short team, so much so that I played forward whereas I had always been a guard in high school. For some reason, we were also stuck in a league where many of the other schools had money to recruit really good players and teams that were far better than us. In the beginning of the season, we traveled to Nazareth College and suffered a rather debilitating loss. Their players towered over us literally. We didn't win one jump ball, and I can't tell you how many times I ate the ball that day. We couldn't get the ball down the court, couldn't get it anywhere near the hoop, and were absolutely ineffective at stopping them from scoring one basket after another. When all was said and done, it was Nazareth 108, Wells College 15. I've done the math, it's a 93 point spread.

There was no way for that loss not to feel humiliating. The local college radio stations picked it up, and the score went out over all the airwaves. We were quite the laughing stock and the butt of many a public, locker room joke. But, (Butt, butt), we had a second crack at them that season and on our own turf By the next time we played Nazareth, we had not grown any taller, of course, but we were better and tougher. We lost again, but not by 93 points, maybe 20 something and, more importantly, we outscored them in the second half. It felt like a huge victory.

Learn from your mistakes, don't give up the game without trying some more. Use your experiences in sports to feel what loss is. Learn how to manage it, be taught by it, accept it gracefully and move on. Because it is, after all, only a game. You will suffer much deeper losses in life, I guarantee it. So be prepared. Start teaching yourselves now how to cope with the loss of a game, a fair-to middling season, or a personal bad day, and I also guarantee you will deal with loss better further down the road.

5. GENDER POLITICS. I grew up in my neighborhood playing softball, kickball, football, baseball, and basketball 97 with girls and boys. There were no gender distinctions. I had no reason to think I was any different than, more importantly, any less worthy than, my buddies Dale, George, Phil, and Dave.

That changed when I got to high school and started playing team sports. This was the early 1970s. Title IX, which was intended to equalize academic and athletic programs across gender lines, had only just been enacted. The field hockey team in my high school, between 1972-1976, had one field and one field only on which to practice and to play games. The various boys' football teams had several fields: their practice fields could get all chewed up and they'd still have a really fine field for game day. 

My school district encompassed three towns. On the days when the boys' varsity basketball team had a game, the high school, regulation size, fancy gym was reserved for them. The remaining gyms in the district's schools were then parceled out in a certain hierarchical fashion with the girls being on the bottom. So, on those days, in order to practice, the varsity and junior varsity girls' teams got on a bus and drove to the next town several miles away, eating up precious practice time, to play in an undersized, ill equipped, not well lit elementary school gym.

One day during track season, my hurdle mates and I had just finished meticulously setting up the hurdles when the boys' team came out onto the field and a number of them, for whatever reasons, knocked down each and every one of the hurdles, just as we were preparing to start running them. Our female coach stood by and laughed, somewhat sheepishly, somewhat in complicity, as if it would be unfeminine to make them stop. They were not made to put the hurdles back up, and no one had the courage or insight to let them know that this was not acceptable behavior.

I know, in the catalog of gross injustices that have been perpetrated against peoples of the world for their differences - their skin color, religion, age, disability, gender, and sexual orientation - that these things were minor, minor ills. But it was my first awakening to discrimination and inequality based on sex, my sex. I went home after track practice that day and balled my eyes out. I felt so devalued and hurt. I had no idea until then that because I was a girl, I wasn't worthy of respect.

But when I was done crying, I got mad and so did my girl teammates. We had very few role models, though. Things then weren't like they are today. You couldn't turn on the television and find women's competition on ESPN or the LPGA on one of the major networks. And I'm sure before my time, things were even worse. The only way I knew who past women athletes were was by ordering a paperback book from the Scholastic Book Service that, thankfully, among all the paeans to male heroics on the field, told the stories of a few female athletes as well, like Babe Didrikson, Althea Gibson, and Wilma Rudolph. My generation had Billy Jean King and Chris Evert occasionally in the public eye, but that was it.

As a consequence, my friends and I donned the personas of ground breaking, radical women who were redefining gender roles in the political arena. My nickname became Jane Fonda, who spoke out against the Viet Nam war then and became the aggressive bitch everyone loved to hate. There was a no-jewelry rule in basketball games in those days, maybe still today. Bracelets, necklaces or other metal jewelry weren't allowed so players wouldn't be inadvertently cut by a sharp edge. I had a Prisoner of War bracelet, though, and a superstitious feeling that if I ever took it off, Commander W. D. Clower wouldn't make it home. So I wore it into a game once, unbeknownst to my coach. When the ref saw it, he stopped the game and asked me to remove it. I refused and sat on the bench for the rest of the game. I was 14, and it was my first scary act of civil disobedience.

Another friend became Angela Davis whose proudly raised fist and bold Afro became symbols of not only the gender inequality but the invidious racism that she and others have to battle in this country. Yet another friend was Gloria Steinem. And so on.

We appropriated the identities of those on-the-fringe women because we felt like them; we felt like pioneers ourselves in our own little, very rural high school world. We usurped the term "jock," which was usually used pejoratively and always referred to males, and turned it back on ourselves making it our own. We were jocks, not girl jocks, jocks, good athletes, and proud of it.

We squawked about the ridiculously less money that was spent on the girls' athletic programs, the rotten uniforms, no access to the weight room, the lack of assistant coaches, trainers and managers, the scheduling of gyms, the absolute absence of publicity for the girls' efforts, and the fact that the cheer leaders never cheered for us. And, you know what was really ironic, the girls' teams were way better than the boys' teams. We won consistently; they lost constantly. It was insult on top of injury. But I don't regret it for one second. It taught me about the balance of power in the world and helped make me a political animal.

Don't forget, you're women. You probably haven't had to deal with gender inequalities in terms of your experience here, although Coach LaBar tells me that Title IX still needs to have some teeth. But you might face these inequities in your lifetime outside these walls; and I tell you, the battle isn't over yet.

6. FRIENDSHIP. There probably isn't enough I could say about the friendships I have gained playing women's sports. The solidarity among my girl classmates in high school as we forged both our individual identities and a class consciousness of ourselves as young women is invaluable. We sang together as a team boisterously, changing the lyrics of popular tunes to fit the travails of grueling field hockey practices and the idiosyncrasies of our drill-sergeant coach. We listened to Janis Joplin in the locker room before games, cranking up the volume as high as an old phonograph with a vinyl record and one speaker could possibly go. After an especially difficult playoff game which we had won, we were so out of our minds with glee that our coach in the front seat of the bus turned a blind eye and ear to what we were doing and let us cram as many people in the back two seats of the bus as we could for the sake of establishing what we hoped would be some goofy world's record. I think we managed 19.

When I first arrived at Wells as a neophyte freshman, I joined other scared newcomers on the hockey field for an introduction to the athletics program at the college. One girl with whom I had spoken a few times and hit it off a little bit started pulling out clumps of grass in the middle of the presentation and throwing them at me on the sly, just as if we were back in grade school misbehaving behind the teacher's back. I knew at that point that I had somehow arrived. That someone already cared enough to chance being my pal by behaving like a total ass. Sue Rogers and I became fast friends, roommates for two years, and teammates on the basketball team. When we went to away games, we used to snitch towels from the locker room of the other team so that, by season's end, we each had our own personal collection of completely nonabsorbent, ubiquitous white college towels stamped with names the likes of William Smith, Oswego, and Kirkland. Nazareth College, of course, was the prize.

In winter, when the college still had January term, Sue and I would sled down the student union hill on dining hall trays crashing into Dodge at the bottom. We then performed the traditional Olympic ceremony, mumbling through the words of the national anthem, presenting each other with pretend gold medals in the downhill competition. The memories are legion. We have remained close, close friends over the years through many ups and downs, personal challenges and a one-time unfortunate rift in our friendship.

Another good friend, Renee Forgensi, and I started our college hockey career together here and ended it together at that last overtime game. I called her "Forgetsi" or "Forgetsi-Not." She called me "Mohner." We have served in the Alumnae Association for the last few years, and I am continually impressed by the seeming unending dedication and energy of my peer.

One last memory: the sheer delight of being invited to an end-of- the-year hockey party at Mrs. Maloney's house where, like Queens, we dipped delectable fruits and cheeses into yummy dark chocolate fondue sauce, laughing and hugging each other all night long about the shared experiences of the season.

These friendships and many others gained through sports will last me to the end of my life, I bet. Each of you and your teammates will grow and change, but if that common bond is there, that original shared experience, the love will continue forever. Take good care of your friends. They will abide by you way longer than the memory of a bad game, a missed shot or an unsaved goal.

7. Finally - and this is really a culmination of the foregoing - what my participation in women's athletics gave me was an identity. My involvement in team sports happened during some of the formative years of a young person's life, between ages 14 and 21. And who I am today was shaped by each of the other six things I have talked about here.

When I think about field hockey or basketball or track, it never means just the game. It's all these other important facets of not just competition, but of life that have melded together to make me the person you see now. I wouldn't give that up for anything in the world. 

And I imagine if you are lucky as I was and am, it will be the same for you. Play your hearts out, cherish your time at Wells, both on and off the playing surface, and it will hold you in great, long- lasting stead.

Delivered May 6, 2001 at Wells College.