Alison Carlson
For a brief time in the mid-1970s, long before it became known as an incubator for nascent tech companies, Stanford was a hotbed for a different kind of start-up, the future varsity women’s sport. And that era’s serial entrepreneur was Alison Carlson, ’78, who came to Stanford expecting to play two sports but ending up starting two and playing a third.
A three-sport athlete at a private prep school in New York, Carlson had chosen Stanford in part because she didn’t want to be as pale and overworked as her two older sisters, who had both gone to Yale. “I thought I could have a renaissance experience at Stanford, with both academics and athletics,” says Carlson. Her plan seemed simple enough: Study poli sci and later hum bio, and join the gymnastics and tennis teams.
In search of the gymnastics office on her first day on campus, Carlson walked into Encina Gym, which until that very month had been an all-male sanctuary, closed to women. “I opened the door and there were these huge, naked men in the hall,” recalls Carlson. Flustered, she ran out, thinking she had the wrong place. A passing professor saw her red face, laughed, and told her that was the football players’ way of protesting that the place had just gone co-ed. Eyes firmly on the ground, Carlson re-entered and found the office of gymnastics coach Sadao Hamada, where she got another shock: Stanford had no women’s gymnastics team.
Carlson left the office thinking that was that, but sometime later Hamada contacted her and offered to find her a coach if she wanted to start a team. And so Carlson spent a year training, albeit never competing, on uneven bars, a beam and a mat in Encina Gym with a 6-foot-4 coach named Sven. (Her timing was key: Stanford had had a women’s gymnastics team, coached by PE instructor Heidi Klaus, starting in 1967. But after Klaus left in 1971, female gymnasts had struggled to secure high-level coaching through WPE.) Carlson was the only person training with Sven that first year, but she was, in effect, the start of the program that would gain varsity status in 1978, produce 33 gymnasts who have earned a combined 115 All-America honors, and claim two third-place NCAA finishes (2004 and 2008).
Her sports ventures didn’t stop there. As a sophomore, Carlson spent three weeks learning the game of lacrosse from Roble dorm mate Helen Hunt Bouscaren. There was no women’s team at the time, but Carlson knew from experience that Stanford would be open to starting one. She and Hunt Bouscaren put a meeting announcement in the Daily, rounded up a volunteer coach from Menlo College and talked the athletic department into giving them a small budget. “Santa Barbara, UCLA and Berkeley were the only other teams in California, so we’d play them over and over again,” says Carlson. “My favorite thing was the lacrosse team, because it was so much fun to build up that team and to learn a new sport.” Indeed, one of Carlson’s many careers after college was trying new sports—including baseball and rowing—for an NPR show she helped originate called Only a Game.
In between kick-starting gymnastics and lacrosse (which became a varsity sport in 1995), Carlson did play a little tennis. “I came from the East Coast and I thought I was good, but I got my ass whipped at Stanford,” she says. She was so low on the team ladder that she played in only 10 matches in her first two years and was eventually relegated to practice player/team manager, a role that earned her two credits but no glory when the team won the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) title her senior year.
But she did leave a sports legacy at Stanford—two, in fact. “Stanford really wanted to be a leader in gender equity, and that made for a wonderfully positive experience for me,” says Carlson. “I definitely got my renaissance experience.”
Ann Thrupp
Ann Thrupp, ’79, was always long on stamina and speed—they were her calling cards in high school basketball and field hockey—but it took her 18 years and a stroke of serendipity to find their ideal outlet. As a freshman at Stanford in the fall of 1975, she tried out for the basketball team—you could still do that back then—and found herself, to her surprise, far out in front of the pack of other hoops wannabes in a timed conditioning run at Angell Field. George Berry, ’76, an assistant on the men’s track team who was helping organize a fledgling women’s cross-country team, happened to be watching as Thrupp easily churned out two sub-6-minute miles in her basketball shoes. Afterward he asked her if she’d be interested in running a cross-country race on campus that Saturday. Before Thrupp could think of all the reasons she might not—she owned no running shoes and had never run in a race—Berry had escorted her to the equipment room at Encina Gym, where he produced for her a used, wrinkled red Stanford track T-shirt.
Fueled only by a glazed doughnut from the Tresidder convenience store, Thrupp was the top Stanford female finisher in that first race, an invitational on the Stanford golf course. And so began the career of the woman who would become the first three-time All-American in women’s cross-country history. “It was exhilarating to run,” says Thrupp, now executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute. “Our team was very new, so we drove ourselves in our cars, we paid our own way to everything. We had no money, no support at all.” Thrupp, who won many of the races she entered, quickly became the team’s top runner and champion recruiter, hand-drawing come-run-with-us flyers and cajoling other women she saw jogging on campus to join the team.
Mentored by Berry and men’s cross-country coach Marshall Clark, Thrupp’s star rose quickly. As a sophomore, she was awarded an athletic scholarship; enjoyed an all-expenses-paid trip to the nationals in Madison, Wis., where she finished 15th out of 250 runners, good for the first of her three All-America plaques; placed third (first among collegians) in the 10,000 meters at the 1977 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Nationals at UCLA; and drew the attention of Nike, which started sending her free shoes. “Anne stood out because of her self-confidence,” says Laurel Treon Morrow, ’73, MA ’75, who became Thrupp’s coach in 1978. “She had intelligence, focus and, like all great runners, an ability to acknowledge, accept and get past the pain. It hurts to perform at that level.”
Thrupp lost her chance to become the sport’s first four-time All-American as a fifth-year senior in 1979 when she finished out of the top 15 at nationals. But she never lost her love for running. At 58, she still races and still often wins her age group. “A lot of women run these days, but not many did back then,” she says. “It was a pretty big thrill to be a pioneer.”
Barbara Finn
Barbara Finn, ’75, loved sports as a kid, but playing volleyball, basketball and softball at Palo Alto’s Gunn High School in the late 1960s offered little glory and a lot of grief for girls. “If the boys wanted to practice anything in the gym, we had to play our games outside, on the blacktop,” she recalls. “In second period, the announcements would come through—‘Girls volleyball game this afternoon,’ and people would start cracking up. Sports were my passion, but I lived in this shame.”
Finn assumed it would be better in college. When she got to campus in the fall of 1971, she says, “I had no idea how bad the athletics situation was at Stanford, no idea.” There was no volleyball team, so she played basketball at Roble her first year. “No one came to our games, and I would have been embarrassed if they had. I didn’t tell anyone I played because I was so used to people snickering and making fun of women playing sports.”
Midway through her freshman year, Finn considered transferring to UC Davis for a better sports experience. Instead, she stuck around and, as a sophomore, put an ad in the Daily announcing a meeting for women interested in starting a volleyball team. Eight or nine women showed up. One of them found a volunteer coach, Bruce Downing, and Finn and several others scrounged around for practice time. There was little available at Roble, and Maples was out of the question. So the players piled into cars and drove over to Hayward State, down to San Jose State or up to San Francisco City College. “San Jose State would have these 12 huge courts; four weren’t being used, so we’d take over one,” says Finn. “No one noticed. We never got special permission. We just kind of did it.”
For uniforms, they sewed their own red shorts and bought T-shirts and had “Stanford” printed on the back. Paying their own airfare and cramming together in cheap motels, they played in tournaments wherever they could find them. In 1973 or 1974, Finn recalls, they played in the Open Nationals in Knoxville, Tenn., and took the U.S. National Team to three games. “Flo Hyman was on that team, and I aced her,” says Finn, grinning now at the memory. “One ace. Right at her feet. That’s my claim to fame.”
Though the hassles and expense of playing volleyball were considerable, Finn and her cohorts never questioned their commitment to finding a way. “It was in our bones; we were addicts,” she says. “The thing I am most proud of from Stanford is playing volleyball. The classes were fine and I did fine in classes, but that’s not what kept me going. It was volleyball. It was the team and feeling like I belonged finally, even if other people didn’t pay any attention to us.”
The team wouldn’t earn varsity status or university support until the year after Finn graduated. But she would reap some reward from the team’s eventual success. Several years after Finn set up a clinical psychology practice in Menlo Park in 1988, then-volleyball head coach Don Shaw and current associate head coach Denise Corlett asked her to serve as the team psychologist. Finn did so for nearly a decade. “I have five NCAA championship rings, and they are my most treasured possessions,” she says. “To be able to come back when it is such a huge sport has been a little bittersweet,” she adds. “I’m thrilled it got great, but it was brutal at the time, and so unfair.”
Kelli Anderson, ’84, is grateful that Stanford women’s rugby had a trainer present when she dislocated her hip during her one and only rugby game in 1981.
