COACH AT ELMS COLLEGE GLAD SHE STAYED
By Ron Chimelis
rchimelis@repub.com
CHICOPEE, MA - When Elms College went to coeducational status in 1998, taking its sports programs along on the sweeping transformation, Cheryl R. Condon was not immune to the apprehension felt on campus.
Some faculty members left, but Condon did not.
"However I felt about it, I stayed," said Condon, the athletic director at the time, and still the coach of a softball team that has won 292 games in her 22 years.
"I stayed because somebody needed to be welcoming," she said. "I took it as my challenge. I knew when all the cards fell, it could be wonderful."
In her view, the transition was going to occur in any event, so it behooved her to make sure it was done properly. A decade later, Elms officials say that has happened.
"Our commitment is to gender equity," said current athletic director Louise T. McCleary. "I think we work hard to treat all programs the same, and that's why we have avoided the animosity."
Elms has fielded teams since 1980. Its 10-year coed history is not much shorter than the 18 years of all-women's teams that preceded it.
The college's history, though, set a powerful precedent. As the single-gender era was ending in 1998, the women's softball team was almost unanimously opposed to coed status, though grudgingly aware of its inevitability.
According to McCleary, who arrived in 2002, any early reluctance has been replaced by genuine acceptance. Elms now sponsors eight athletic teams for women and seven for men.
In 2001, 125 students played sports. That number is now 225, said McCleary, who has tried to retain the best traditions of the single-gender years in a new age.
"Our colors are still green and gold," she noted.
And don't even ask about calling the women's teams the Lady Blazers.
"That's out everywhere," she said, though a handful of schools, notably the University of Tennessee, still use the separate distinction.
Adding men's teams put Elms in an ironic position. The spirit of the federal Title IX legislation, developed in the 1970s, is to guarantee equal opportunity to both genders.
Almost always, the Title IX debate is framed around giving women a more equitable chance. At Elms, though, the challenge was to give men that same chance - without making women feel pushed aside.
"It was like, here we go again," said Condon, aware that many women had chosen a single-gender college to avoid feeling second-class in the first place.
"But we were all Blazers," she said. "My job was to be inclusive to everyone."
That required strict attention to detail.
"The women asked me why the men's basketball uniforms were custom-made," Condon said. "That had been approved before I came in, and I never would have approved them. But they noticed."
Practice time and facilities had to be shared at a school where locker room space had not been built for so many teams, and not at all for men.
"In the workout room, the weights were only up to 35 pounds," said Damien Bradley, a basketball player from Frontier Regional High School in Deerfield who was part of the first men's class.
What he said he did not encounter was hostility.
"I saw stories over that first summer, saying students and faculty were upset, but when I got there, there was none of that," said Bradley, a 2002 Elms graduate whose 1,158 points were a school record until 2005.
Adding men's teams has expanded the college's visibility.
"I'd never heard of it, but the coach kept calling me," said Ivan Andujar, a junior volleyball captain from Puerto Rico. "(McCleary) called, too. Everybody was so nice."
Bradley, now 28 and living in Quincy, recalls friends asking why he chose a college they thought still only served women.
"That's changing," he said. "Some guys coming in now might not even know it was an all-women's college once."
The men's teams experienced growing pains. Some soccer players had never played the sport competitively before college, Condon said.
Even so, concern existed that the sheer novelty of men's sports would push the women's teams to the background.
McCleary said the college has done its best to avoid this, with satisfying results.
"We get about the same amount of media," said Danielle M. Gero, a three-sport junior athlete from Holyoke. "(The men) do get more fans. But a lot of that is the basketball team, and they're just amazing."
The men's basketball team has reached the NCAA Division III tournament in four straight seasons. Its coach is Edward P. Silva, a Lowell native who arrived at the age of 27 in 2001, feeling uniquely suited to a unique job.
"Every meaningful relationship I've had, including with the people who raised me, was with women," he said. "That was important, because the administration here was just about all female.
Whatever remnants of unease Silva sensed on the campus at the time have largely vanished, he said, with many previously ardent opponents voicing their support.
For some players, the transition was not always easy. Silva recruited players from urban areas, including New York City, to a college that had rarely attracted students from such environments.
Silva, who also teaches sociology, carefully monitored the potential for culture shock.
"I am race-conscious, but I'm more class-conscious," he said.
Silva describes his coaching style as "nurturing.
He said, "A lot of these guys had come from very patriarchal settings. They had to learn that some things they might say, for instance, might pass elsewhere, but they'd get called on it here."
Elms officials are excited about the future. There is talk of adding sports for each gender.
But the college is at least as proud of its recent past. Next month, Bradley will be the first male inducted into the Elms Athletics Hall of Fame.
Just as Condon is happy she stayed, he is happy he came.
"Getting the chance to help start something totally new . . . most athletes don't get that chance," he said. "When you're 18, you don't think much about that, but now when I go back to campus for alumni games and things like that, it's a source of pride."
© 2008 The Republican Company. All rights reserved.
Used with permission.