Ivy@50

In Closing
The student-athletes of the first 50 years of Ivy League Athletics — including those profiled in the Ivy@50 celebration — have laid a foundation for the present and future. In closing, Jeff Orleans addresses that continuity.

As so many of this year's profiles have shown, Ivy League student-athletes succeed not just through their own dedication, but also through the care and skill of literally hundreds of coaches, administrators and faculty who teach and mentor and befriend them, who celebrate with them in victory and console them as they push past hard losses.

These efforts are nourished by a rich tradition, decades older than formal Ivy League competition, that passes confidence and discipline from one generation of student-athletes and coaches to the next — a tradition to which today's Ivy League athletes and coaches are proud to contribute.

Every Ivy League athlete and coach has his or her own examples of how that tradition works. The story that best symbolizes this continuity for me grows out of an early 50th Anniversary profile and this February's Ivy League Indoor Heptagonal Track and Field Championships.

The Heps are the Ivy League's oldest championships and they are very intense, as men and women from the eight schools compete in some of the world's oldest kinds of athletic events. This year's meet was no exception, and today's sidebar features some of the best Heps performances, as well as highlights from other Ivy League winter championships and sports.

Today's story, however, began in the fall of 1960, when the late Stephen Misati Machooka came from the Kisii District of Kenya, to Ithaca, New York, and enrolled at Cornell University. As Brett Hoover's October 19, 2006, '50th' profile recounts, Machooka became an instant star, and as the first notable Kenyan distance runner an instant celebrity in his sport as well. After graduating and returning to Kenya he had a long and varied career that included teaching, farming, and significant contributions to rural agricultural and economic development.

Machooka's 50th Anniversary profile generated a number of responses: of appreciation from his family, of interest from many readers, and perhaps most unexpectedly, a contact from Toby Tanser, founder of Shoe4Africa, a non-profit organization that collects used running shoes and distributes them to aspiring runners throughout Africa. Mr. Tanser inquired about Machooka in connection with a possible book about Kenyan runners that would generate support for these efforts.

Out of these discussions with Brett Hoover, who also plays a central role in organizing and running both the Indoor and Outdoor Heps came some more immediate assistance. With willing help from Ivy League coaches and teams, and from our hosts at the New York Armory, Brett and Wesley Harris organized a successful shoe collection for Shoe4Africa at the Friday Heps practice session.

This response is characteristic of a commitment to service that so many athletes have, in the Ivy League and across the country. Yet thinking of it as I watched the preliminary Heps events the next day, it also seemed to exemplify the continuity of Ivy League athletics: individual athletes and coaches coming together both to achieve new standards of excellence and to continue a tradition of service that connects them to one of the earliest stars of formal Ivy League competition.

There are scores of links like this in the 50th Anniversary profiles, and even more in the many, many stories that we simply did not have the space to run. Today's Ivy League student-athletes continue to learn from, and to honor, their athlete-alumni predecessors: men and women from many different backgrounds, playing many different sports and influenced by thousands of coaches, who grew into so many different careers and made so many different kinds of contributions to their communities.

We hope the Ivy League's 50th Anniversary Celebration has helped you to get to know both those alumni and the student-athletes who continue to emulate them. And we hope that as the 50th Celebration ends, you'll not only refer back to it, but also that you'll keep reading www.IvyleagueSports.com for continuing news about Ivy League athletes, past and present. We think you'll agree that today's Ivy League student-athletes are worthy successors to the graduates whom we have profiled this year — and that they surely will deserve their own profiles in years to come.

I would like to close this Celebration with thanks to the Ivy League women and men who agreed to be profiled and were so forthcoming in their contacts with us, to the Council of Ivy Group Presidents for supporting our year's work, to the Ivy League Sports Information staffs for their assistance, and to KarmaRush for designing and producing our website.

And I want to offer special personal thanks to Ivy League Associate Director Brett Hoover, who conceived of this Celebration, and who as editor and writer made it work through unanticipated difficulties; to our principal writer, Stephen Eschenbach; to our principal contributing writer, former All-Ivy and Olympian Meredith Rainey-Valmon, Harvard '90, and to our other contributors: Suzanne Eschenbach; and former and current Ivy Office interns E.J. Crawford, Josi Carlson, Wesley Harris, Bethany Karantonis and Alex Searle.

Jeff Orleans, Executive Director

— Jeff Orleans

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This website will be hosting a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of formal Ivy League competition, featuring special articles every weekday through the end of May 2007.

Although some League rivalries predate the Civil War, and the term 'Ivy League' was used in newspapers as early as the mid-1930s, the Ivy League began formally with the Ivy Presidents' agreement of 1954, and the first year of formal competition was 1956-57.

The first formal Ivy League contest -- on Sept. 29, 1956, when the Columbia Lions' football team hosted the Brown Bears at Baker Field in upper Manhattan -- will be commemorated at that same site (now Wien Stadium) with a ceremony on Saturday, September 30, when Columbia hosts the Princeton Tigers.

Since that first contest, more than 75,000 Ivy athletes have played under a unique model of college sports, sharing a remarkably consistent goal: to provide successful athletics as an integral part of the full undergraduate experience -- combining the values and lessons of athletics with those of the classroom and laboratory, the campus and the community -- to produce leaders in every walk of life.

The 50th Celebration is not intended as a formal or complete history of each era, sport or school in the last half century. There's simply too much history to be able do that -- although the online Ivy League Record Book provides a wealth of information about Ivy League standings and All-Ivy teams, national successes in every sport, and individual athletic and academic achievements.

Rather, the Celebration will ask more than 200 former Ivy League athletes to tell the story of Ivy athletics through an almost-daily series of interview-based profiles. Combined with more comprehensive theme-based features (such as the Ivy League's long Olympic history), these profiles will cover every part of these 50 years at all eight schools -- all of the more than 30 Ivy women's and men's championship sports (the broadest collegiate athletic participation in the country) -- and the incredibly diverse backgrounds and careers of Ivy athletes.

Some of these alumni were stars or champions. Others -- like most athletes at every level of competition -- played more anonymously or with only modest team success. In their combined athletic and academic Ivy League experiences, however, each of them found values and habits that led to later success, whether in global arenas or in their own families and neighborhoods.

Special aspects of the Celebration will include:

a preview of each week's stories in the weekly Ivy League email newsletter, which is available free of charge on the left hand side of this page, beneath the menu. Just simply place your email address in that box and select 'GO.'
an earlier (preceding Friday) preview for members of the media, Ivy Sports Information Directors and other Ivy institutional staff (media may sign up by writing to Jane Antis).
archiving of all profiles and features on www.ivy50.com, chronologically as well as by both school and sport.

We welcome reprinting of all stories, with appropriate credit, in public media, and in all institutional media (including websites, weekly bulletins and calendars, game programs, and alumni magazines).

The Ivy League 50th Celebration will be Co-Edited by Ivy League Associate Director Brett Hoover and by Stephen Eschenbach, a long-time contributor to each of the Ivy alumni magazines who also will be Senior Writer. Other contributing writers will include two-time Olympian and 1990 Harvard graduate Meredith Rainey Valmon; former Ivy Public Information Assistants Josi Carlson and E.J. Crawford; current Ivy Public Information Assistants Wes Harris and Bethany Karantonis; and Ivy League Executive Director Jeff Orleans and Associate Director Chuck Yrigoyen.

We hope you will enjoy this special year-long Ivy feature, and we look forward to reading your comments and answering your questions, which can be sent to Hoover.