Sports Growing at All-Women’s School : Mount Holyoke (Mass.) Now Has a $9 Million Sports Complex

Olympic gold medalist Holly Metcalf remembers when she discovered rowing at Mount Holyoke College.

“I wanted to try something different, something on the water,” she said. “This was the only sport you could start as a beginner with no experience and just do it. If you go out for the swim team, you’d better know how to swim first.”

The rowing program at Mount Holyoke was more liberal than that, though, and Metcalf made the team. Rowing also was more spartan in 1976 when she arrived on the campus at South Hadley, Mass., than it is today.

“Back then, we didn’t even have a boathouse,” said Metcalf, who now coaches the school’s rowers. “Today, we do.”

Mount Holyoke also has a new $9 million sports complex dedicated last month, which doubles the space available for physical education activities at the college. Metcalf says the building is a tribute to the student body.

“They spurred the change to a more serious attitude about sports,” she said. “They felt if they were going to spend the time practicing, they wanted to be good.

“It marks a change to the old approach, which was, ‘Enjoy sports, but if you don’t win, it’s OK as long as you have fun.’ That just doesn’t work with the kind of perfectionist students at Mount Holyoke.”

Founded in 1837, Mount Holyoke is the nation’s oldest all-women’s college, with no plans to change its status. In the 1970s, when many of the other elite liberal arts colleges for women that comprise the “Seven Sisters” became co-educational, Mount Holyoke students and alumnae voted against admitting men.

Tuition, room and board at the 1,900-student school come to $12,400 a year and the college board scores of its students are equally high. This year’s freshman class had average scores of 600 on both the math and verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, according to college spokeswoman Lou Stone.

Metcalf left school in the spring of 1980 to try out for the Olympic rowing team. “I didn’t make it but I was close enough that it was an incentive to keep me going,” she said.

She completed her degree in English and music and remained in rowing with the United States national team. In 1984, Metcalf made it to the Olympics, winning a gold medal as a member of the American women’s eight oars with coxswain team at the Los Angeles Games.

Now she’s back at Mount Holyoke.