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• Wrap-Up
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WATER POLO

When It Counts, Victory Over the Golden Bears

YOU HAD TO FIGURE it would come down to this. Heading into the NCAA tournament, Stanford’s defending national champion water polo team had already played Cal four times, winning twice and losing twice. Each contest had been determined by one goal, including the Bears’ defeat of the Cardinal on their way to the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation title. It seemed only appropriate, then, that the two schools should meet to decide the 2002 national championship in December.

Cardinal junior Mike Derse said as much after Stanford dispatched UC-San Diego in the NCAA semifinals, 10-5, to advance to the championship game. “I couldn’t think of a better way to end the season than to play Cal,” he told a reporter.

Stanford and Cal had previously met in the NCAA title game six times since the tournament began in 1969. The record? Stanford 3, Cal 3. The last battle was in 1992, when the Bears won in triple overtime, 12-11. But Cal hadn’t been to the finals since 1995, when it lost to UCLA; and Stanford was returning a team of veterans familiar with the spotlight.

“Honestly, I thought we were going to beat them by three goals,” says first-year Cardinal head coach John Vargas. He had to settle for one. Led by sophomore sensation Tony Azevedo, who scored four goals in the game and was named tournament MVP, Stanford earned its 10th NCAA crown by defeating Cal, 7-6.

The Cardinal jumped to an early lead on two first-period goals by senior All-American Peter Hudnut and never relinquished it. Trailing 7-4 with just over four minutes to play, Cal scored twice late in the final period, and Stanford needed seven saves by four-time All-American goalie Nick Ellis to preserve the win. “Our defense was playing very well,” Vargas says. “We almost didn’t have to talk.”

Azevedo’s four goals in the final game culminated another stellar season. The American Water Polo Coaches Association named him Player of the Year for the second year in a row, and his 95 goals crushed Stanford’s single-season record of 87, set by Erich Fischer in 1986.

“He’s something special,” says Vargas, who first worked with Azevedo as the coach of the 2000 Olympic team in Sydney. “[His performance] just shows you what an outstanding player and teammate he is, how he makes other players better. I think his approach is great. He works so hard, and what he says he’s sincere about. He backs it up.”

Although the team will lose Hudnut, Ellis and fellow seniors Jeff Guyman and Jeff Nesmith, the Cardinal is already pointing to next season. After celebrating the victory and back-to-back titles, team members returned to campus to find an e-mail message from Vargas.

“Come back from break in shape and ready to work hard,” the coach wrote. “Stanford has never won three straight national championships. (Cal has.)”

—BRIAN EULE, ’01

WRAP-UP

Volleyball, Soccer Take Second

WHILE THEIR FELLOW STUDENTS packed up and headed home for winter break, the No. 3 women’s volleyball team and the No. 9 men’s soccer team were hard at work trying to capture NCAA crowns. Both teams did better than the rankings predicted, returning home in second place.

As defending national champions, the women’s volleyball team went to the Final Four in New Orleans in December with a 31-4 record and hopes as high as an Ogonna Nnamani leap. After beating Hawaii, 3-0, the Cardinal women fell to the University of Southern California, 1-3. The Women of Troy posted a 31-1 season, with their only loss coming at the hands of Stanford in November.

Cardinal outside hitter and four-time All-American Logan Tom, ’03, was named Player of the Year—for the second time—by the American Volleyball Coaches Association. Tom, who is the only current collegiate player on the U.S. national team and is about 50 units shy of finishing her international relations degree, made her professional debut in January with the MRV/Minas of Brazil. Joining her on the All-America first team was junior middle blocker Sara McGee, who suited up as a rookie for the women’s basketball team a week after the championship game. Sophomore outside hitter Nnamani, who was named to the All-America second team, had a .327 kill percentage for the season.

Scoring on a header in the second overtime period, the men’s soccer team defeated Creighton, 2-1, in the NCAA semifinals and headed into the championship game against third-seeded UCLA. In two regular-season matchups, UCLA had won in the final minutes; and in Dallas, the Bruins pulled it off again, scoring the game’s only goal with two minutes remaining. Stanford ended the season 18-5-2 under second-year head coach Bret Simon, who said, “We gave it our best effort against UCLA. I told the team to hold their heads up. We had a great season.”

It was the second straight NCAA College Cup appearance for the team. Five seniors suited up in Cardinal red for the last time: All-Americans Todd Dunivant, who finished fifth in school history with 80 games played, and Roger Levesque; Johanes Maliza, right behind Dunivant with 78 games; Taylor Graham, a walk-on who became a two-year starter; and goalkeeper Andrew Terris, who recorded 87 saves in his Stanford career. In early February, Dunivant, Levesque, Graham and Maliza were drafted by Major League Soccer.

500 Wins for the Coach, a Ranking for the Team

After capturing his 500th coaching win against the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December, men’s basketball head coach Mike Montgomery led the Cardinal to upsets over two highly ranked opponents in January. Stanford held No. 12 Oregon to 33 percent shooting and outrebounded the Ducks 45-26 in an 81-57 win, then stunned No. 1 Arizona on the Wildcats’ home court, 82-77. The Cardinal came back two days later to eke out a 58-57 win over Arizona State, lifting the team to a 16-5 record (7-2 in the Pac-10) and a No. 25 ranking heading into February.

After 21 Dual Meets, Gentry Still Undefeated

Sophomore wrestler Matt Gentry captured his 10th dual-meet win of the season and the 21st consecutive dual-meet victory of his career by defeating Cal State-Bakersfield’s Brian Cobb, 8-6, on January 26. The following week, the 157-pounder, who has not lost a dual-meet match since January 2002, took second place at the All Cal Invitational at San Francisco State. The Cardinal was 3-10 (1-4 in the Pac-10) heading into its final dual meets against UC-Davis and Fresno State.

Somersaulting to Early-Season Victories

The men’s and women’s gymnastics teams, ranked fourth and eighth respectively at press time, opened the season with wins at home. The men’s squad beat Cal 212.75 to 211.10, outscoring the Golden Bears on the pommel horse, rings and vault, with senior Marshall Erwin, the 2002 NCAA champion, continuing his dominance on rings. The Cardinal women won their January 31 meet with a team score of 196.575, besting Oregon State’s 196.275, San Jose State’s 193.425 and Seattle Pacific’s 187.825. “I think we are in a perfect spot for this time of the season,” said women’s head coach Kristen Smyth.

The NFL Draft Claims Two

Bob Whitfield was first, in 1991. Then, in December, two-sport star Teyo Johnson became the second Cardinal football player to leave school early for the NFL. A month later, Kwame Harris—the Pac-10’s top offensive lineman in 2002 and an honorable mention All-American—became the third. Johnson, ’04, who had two years of collegiate eligibility remaining in both football and basketball, told the San Jose Mercury News, “I’m ready to test my skills at the next level.” Harris, ’04, will skip his senior season, saying, “My heart yearns for the challenges of the NFL.” Both expect to be selected in April’s draft, and both plan to return to Stanford someday to complete their degrees. The football program had some good news, too. In early February, head coach Buddy Teevens announced a recruiting class that ESPN rated among the top 20 in the nation.

ATHLETICS

What's Next for Title IX

AS HE FINISHES co-chairing a federal panel charged with reassessing Title IX and sports, athletics director Ted Leland predicts changes to come. “We’d be less than honest with ourselves if we said everything is perfect, because it’s not,” he says.

The landmark 1972 statute that bans gender discrimination at schools receiving federal funding was the focus of six months of scrutiny by the 15-member Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, which Leland headed along with former WNBA player Cynthia Cooper. After consulting with experts and holding town meetings across the country, panel members voted in late January to recommend several alternatives for moderate changes to Title IX’s implementing regulations.

What did the panel hear on its travels? “Public support for Title IX is phenomenal—I think many of our politicians would love to have the popularity ratings that Title IX has,” says Leland, PhD ’83. Nonetheless, “a lot of people said, ‘Equal opportunity for women is great, but I think the law ought to be administered differently—it’s been contorted, it’s been confused, it’s been convoluted.’”

The No. 1 concern is proportionality—requiring schools to maintain roughly the same percentage of female athletes as female students. This is the most widely used and easily proven of three tests that schools can choose to establish Title IX compliance. Opponents (including the National Wrestling Coaches Association, which has filed a lawsuit) charge that a proportionality standard is an impermissible quota system and forces budget-strapped schools to eliminate some men’s programs. Many in the civil rights community, however, consider proportionality not only legal, but critical to the success of Title IX, under which women’s participation in sports has increased tenfold at the high school level and fivefold at the college level in the last 30 years.

The commission decided not to recommend eliminating the proportionality standard, but did suggest such modifications as clarifying and increasing the flexibility of the proportionality rule, counting standardized roster slots rather than individual players, or exempting nonscholarship walk-on athletes. It also recommended expanding the role of surveys to gauge student interest in athletics for schools electing a compliance method other than proportionality. Many of the proposals were not approved unanimously, and largely at the urging of U.S. women’s soccer team captain Julie Foudy, ’93, dissenting views were included in the report submitted to Education Secretary Rod Paige.

Leland, who begins a two-month special research leave on March 1, says the commission heard about a number of what he calls “negative unintended consequences” of Title IX. Some schools have dropped low-profile men’s teams like swimming, tennis, gymnastics and wrestling to meet proportionality requirements; others have created what Leland calls “false opportunities” for women who are counted on team rosters but have little or no access to coaching and training. “I see [the commission’s proposals] as a first step in potentially changing the way the law is administered,” he says.

At Stanford, the stats on women’s sports have climbed markedly since Leland was hired in 1991. Female athletes have seven new locker rooms, plus new softball and field hockey facilities. The number of athletic scholarships for women has increased from 74 in 1990 to 139 today. The Cardinal has added five varsity women’s teams in the past 10 years: softball, synchronized swimming, water polo, lacrosse and lightweight crew. And proportionality? The 401 women who competed on varsity teams in 2001-02 represented 46 percent of Stanford athletes, at a time when the percentage of women in the undergraduate student body was 49 percent. That, says Leland, comes within the federally accepted “wiggle room” of 3 percent to 5 percent.

But will this sort of change continue at colleges across the country? “[The commission’s] recommendations give the Bush administration carte blanche to change anything that it is so inclined to change,” Jocelyn Samuels, a vice president of the National Women’s Law Center, told USA Today. Leland counters: “There’s no push by the [Bush] administration to do away with equal opportunity for women in athletics. At the same time, I think it is fair to say that after 30 years of off-and-on implementation of this law, it’s time for the government and the American sporting community to sit down and say, ‘Where are we, how have we done, and how can we make this thing better?’ ”

SWIMMING

Training Technology and Its Trade-Offs

WOMEN'S SWIMMING COACH Richard Quick paces near the water’s edge, eyeing his stopwatch. Swim-capped heads emerge two at a time from the pool’s surface. Sucking in air, the women glance down at gadgets strapped to their wrists, then call out numbers: “175!” “168!” Another swimmer—this one dry and clothed—stands with Quick, scribbling the heart rates next to each name on a portable whiteboard.

“Remember, you’re not necessarily going faster,” Quick tells his team, which is now busy resetting the heart-rate monitors. “Try to be efficient, try to be efficient. Ready—GO!” And they’re off.

Using a monitor to train in different heart-rate zones is just one of the high-tech methods a team member uses to improve her performance. Once or twice a week, she practices with an Aquapacer—a small beeping device worn inside the cap or under the goggle strap—using her “hand hits” on the water’s surface to time her stroke to the beep pace. The Aquapacer, which Quick can control from a central programming unit, helps the swimmer strike the optimal balance between stroke rate and distance per stroke. Then there’s the Rejuvenetics machine, a muscle-stimulation device that uses small electrical charges to decrease swelling after an injury, speed muscle recovery and increase blood flow. “It’s just like a zapper,” says Tara Kirk, ’04, who holds American records in the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke.

Since race outcomes are often determined by hundredths of a second, it’s fitting that technology has found its way into the pool. Both the women’s and the men’s teams have lost NCAA championships by tiny margins in recent years. In 2001, Georgia edged the women’s team by 1 1/2 points; last year, Texas beat the men’s squad by 11 points—the smallest margin of victory since 1984.

“In competitive swimming, there’s a marriage between technology and the art of coaching, and between technology and the art of competing,” Quick says. “I think [technology] is a vital, vital part of it. I use [it] to help me either motivate or analyze what’s going on in training.”

But his poolside counterpart—and friend—has made a different choice. “The little—I call them ‘toys’—that help make swimming maybe more exciting? I would say our guys wouldn’t buy into it,” says men’s coach Skip Kenney. “And I’m not comfortable with it. It’s not my style.

“The guys would have to come to me and say, ‘Look, we’d like to try this,’” Kenney says. “The last thing you want is to ever give your athletes an excuse to have to stop when they’re in the middle of training.”

Gesturing to his computer, complete with large flat-screen monitor, Kenney points out that he’s hardly a technophobe. “The baseball coach and basketball coach don’t even have a clue how to do e-mail,” he says. “I’ve got 320 e-mails, so I definitely know how!”

Given both teams’ dynasty status, it would be difficult to second-guess either coach’s approach. Under Quick, the women have won seven national titles in 14 years. The batteries-not-included men have also won seven NCAA championships, as well as 21 consecutive Pac-10 titles—a record in any sport. At press time, the men were ranked first nationally, with a 7-0 record, and the women were ranked seventh, with a 7-2 record.

For her part, Kirk tries to find a healthy relationship with swim technology. “Sometimes I wish I could just take the heart monitor off,” she says. “Swimmers are racing animals, and a lot of time we just want to get out there and swim. But it’s important for us to gauge where we are in practice. So there’s definitely a balance you have to form.”