Raquel Rodriguez may have a greater appreciation than many of today’s female student-athletes for what it took to bring gender equality to intercollegiate athletics to Penn State and across the nation.
Growing up in Costa Rica, where soccer is the national sport, Rodriguez didn’t know of any girls’ or women’s soccer teams that she could play with and where she could develop her abilities.
From the age of four, when she started playing, until 10, she played with her dad, who taught her the basics of the game, because there wasn’t anything for girls.
“It was a men’s sport, that’s just part of the culture,” says Rodriguez, a junior forward/midfielder on this year’s Penn State women’s soccer team.
The culture has slowly changed. The country started to hold tryouts for national teams, and Rodriguez helped Costa Rica’s U17 team advance to the World Cup in 2008. This year, the country actually hosted the FIFA U17 Women’s World Cup.
It’s still a challenge, however, for female soccer players to gain recognition there. “A lot of people ignore women’s soccer,”
Rodriguez says. “Unfortunately, the only thing they’re used to seeing is when we play against the US or another team that’s really good. People only see us lose, or we didn’t qualify for this or that. … It’s growing still. It’s on its way, but it’s a process.”
Rodriguez came to Penn State in 2012 and made an immediate impact on the women’s soccer team. She scored 4 goals and had 10 assists on her way to being named Big Ten Freshman of the Year. Last season, she had 6 goals and 9 assists.
Coming to Happy Valley, in turn, has had an impact on her. “I feel so blessed,” she says. “I’m so grateful to God and all the awesome people who support me and women’s soccer. It was such a contrast for me to be here. I was amazed by every single thing. I kept saying, ‘Thank you.’ At one point, Coach [Erica] Walsh said, ‘Are all people in Costa Rica so grateful?’ I was saying ‘Thank you’ to pretty much everything.”
While most current female student-athletes who grew up in the United States were able to play in youth leagues and organizations such as AAU that help girls become better in sports, and they’ve had female role models such as Mia Hamm to look up to, the student-athletes at Penn State still have an appreciation and respect for those who came before them — who helped make all of those things possible. They have coaches who can talk about the struggles that occurred to have intercollegiate women’s athletic teams receive the same support as men’s. They have former players who visit and share stories of the past.
With a head coach who also is a former player at Penn State, the field hockey team, perhaps, receives a greater history lesson than most. That may be fitting since it was the field hockey program that made history 50 years ago when it became the first varsity women’s team to play at Penn State.
Char Morett, who played for Penn State’s field hockey team in the late 1970s and is in her 28th season as its head coach, makes sure her players know how far the program has come and that they’re part of a proud tradition.
“We are so much better represented because of all the work Char has done, and [former head coach] Gillian Rattray and so many players who came before us,” said Laura Gebhart, a senior forward/midfielder on this year’s team. “Successful programs need a stream of good players. To consistently bring in good players, programs need a great school and a tradition of excellence to appeal to high-achieving athletes. Next, programs need dedicated coaches who are able to mold those athletes. Penn State has both. The Penn State women among the first to play at the collegiate level set a precedent of integrity, hard work, and success.“
Morett also was an All-American lacrosse player and part of a group of women who played both field hockey and lacrosse under Rattray, who coached both teams for 12 years and won a combined five national titles.
“I couldn’t do that,” said Madison Cyr, a junior All-American midfielder on the lacrosse team. “If you’re in two sports, you’re in season the entire year. It seems impossible to me.”
Cyr has helped the lacrosse program rebuild a winning tradition under head coach Missy Doherty, who was hired in the summer of 2010. The program had won five national titles between 1978 and 1989 but struggled for much of the 2000s.
Now, after making the NCAA Tournament each of the past three seasons, Cyr and her teammates are expecting the program to only get better as the Lions play in the inaugural season of Big Ten women’s lacrosse in the spring.
“It’s going to grow so much with the Big Ten,” Cyr said. “More of our games are going to be televised. … People can watch on TV. It’s going to make us a better team.”
The Lady Lions basketball team also has seen its winning culture reestablished. A national power for many years, the program had four consecutive losing seasons from 2005-06 through 2008-09. The team enters the 2014-15 season as the three-time defending Big Ten champions.
Guard Keke Sevillian was a freshman on last year’s team that won a third consecutive conference title. While she didn’t play many minutes last season, she knows, with four starters gone from last year, it’s up to her and her teammates this year to continue the winning this season.
“It’s now on our shoulders,” she said. “It means a lot to be a Lady Lion. We want to keep the tradition going — it’s all about tradition.”
A part of that tradition goes beyond wins and losses.
“It’s stressed a lot — what it means to be a Lady Lion,” Sevillian said. “From work ethic to off the court, it’s attitude and positivity. Everything is positive about Lady Lion basketball. You have to carry yourself with a lot respect on and off the court. … You just carry that tradition on your shoulders.”
A new tradition has started across University Drive from the Bryce Jordan Center. In Pegula Ice Arena, the women’s ice hockey team will be playing just its third season as a Division I sport this year.
While sophomore forward Laura Bowman comes from a hockey-rich area in Minnesota, she has been impressed with what Penn State has done to create a new tradition in women’s ice hockey.
“The environment they’ve built for women’s athletics is amazing,” said Bowman, who was the Lions’ leading scorer last season with 10 goals. “We have such an amazing staff and amazing facilities. … We’ve started building a new tradition from almost nothing. You know this program isn’t going to fail. It’s only going to have success.”
At the top of the success ladder, when it comes to women’s athletics of late at Penn State, is women’s volleyball. The program has become the dominant program in the country, winning five national titles over the past seven seasons, including taking the championship last season.
That wasn’t the case 35 years ago when Russ Rose took over as head coach of the fledgling program that was in its third season of existence. The Lions would begin to dominate the Atlantic 10 but struggled to advance in the NCAA Tournament against teams from the Midwest and West Coast. They finally reached the Final Four in 1993 and, six years later, after three more trips to the Final Four, they won their first national title.
“[Rose] doesn’t really let us forget from which we came — the sisters before,” senior All-American setter Micha Hancock said. “But he’s cautious. He doesn’t want us to think wecan’t make history.”
Hancock helped the Lions add to that history last season when she was named the NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player as she led Penn State to the national title.
“There’s a lot of pride in our history,” she said. “We’re Penn State athletes and there’s pride in Penn State. We really want to represent that.”
That feeling is spread across the 14 women’s athletic programs at Penn State, and the female student-athletes who are representing the school.
“The female programs have experienced a great deal of success,” Gebhart said. “I have no doubt that success will continue in the future, but I believe the recognition of that success will increase. … I’m hoping more people will want to come out and watch the women’s sports. They will want to watch some great competition, incredible players, and the exciting victories.”
