Course Correction by Ginny Gilder

sports.
    Title IX may have been enacted, but change came slowly, as did the dawning of my own awareness. Growing up, I didn’t experience many sexist putdowns, other than my father’s teasing that I threw “like a girl” when we played running bases and he taught me the correct arm motion. But, for the first time, I discerned new undertones in my family’s comments.
    During Thanksgiving break freshman year, my stepmother, BG, grabbed one of my hands and turned it over to see my palm, dotted with its unique array of healing blisters and rough-edged calluses. She recoiled in horror and, dropping it quickly, said, “What boy would want to hold your hand?”
    My mom saw pictures of me with my crew and remarked with obvious relief that I wasn’t “as big” as my taller teammates. Did she see the irony, wanting to squeeze my unconventional dream into a narrow definition of femininity, tugging me in the same direction of capitulation she had headed twenty years earlier, assuming the role of wife andmother, and losing her dream to travel the world, her independence, and for at least a while, her sanity?
    On the Yale campus, Tony Johnson, the men’s varsity rowing coach, supported the women’s program. Nat, who began coaching the women in the fall of 1973, was a former Yale varsity rower himself. He’d rowed for TJ in the late 1960s and was one of his guys. TJ even contributed $600 from his budget to help launch the women’s club program, but his support seemed to extend only so far, stopping at the doorway of his own crew’s locker room. A handful of dollars couldn’t compensate for his athletes’ vocal dismay regarding the women’s presence. The fact that TJ left their behavior unaddressed communicated his own ambivalence: as long as the women didn’t interfere with the men, we could row. But no rocking the boat.
    As a club sport, the women’s program was relegated to the stinky and confining lagoon, where the men’s freshmen recruits rowed for a few weeks in the fall before joining the rest of their squads at the Robert Cooke Boathouse, twelve miles off campus in the rumpled town of Derby, on the banks of the mellow Housatonic River. The real boathouse remained off limits to the women until they achieved varsity status; after all, rowing emblematized tradition at Yale, and that meant men’s rowing, which dated back to 1852, the year of the country’s first collegiate sporting event—a rowing race between Harvard and Yale.
    Both the heavyweight and lightweight men’s programs operated out of the Robert Cooke Boathouse. Reaching the three-story, three-bay boathouse, painted in Yale’s traditional blue-and-white, required a twenty-five-minute bus ride from campus. Two boat bays were stacked with elegant and pristine Pocock racing shells—singles, pairs, fours, and eights—to provide a full complement of training opportunities for the men. A third bay was reserved for the full-time boat rigger, Jerry Romano, who worked to keep the fleet of shells fighting fit, repairing damaged equipment and rigging boats to suit the coaches’ specifications.
    History nestled in the highest boat racks: aging hulls, graying with dust, names painted on their bows that hearkened back to rowing greats from the 1920s and ’30s, their equally ancient oars sporting leather collars and pencil-thin blades, clustered at the rear of the boat bays.
    At the top of a rickety wood staircase in the back of the middle bay was a pair of tiny offices for the coaches. A large, airy locker room fully equipped with standard toilet and shower facilities dominated the second floor. An uncovered deck stood on the downstream side of the building and gave an unimpeded view of the finish line.
    The Housatonic offered vastly improved rowing conditions compared to the lagoon. The water was clean, the surroundings safe. A dam directly downstream from the Yale