UC Berkeley Web Feature

History and achievements of women's intercollegiate athletics at UC Berkeley

24 August 2007

• The first ever women’s intercollegiate competition in the United States was Cal vs. Stanford in women’s basketball in 1896.
• Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics began as a separate department at UC Berkeley in 1976-77 with 12 sports.
• Forty-five Cal women have won individual national championships, including eight in 2006-07 alone – the most in Cal women’s athletics history.
• Cal women have won four national team championships: Three for women’s crew, 1980 (Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women or AIAW), 2005 (NCAA), 2006 (NCAA); and one for softball, 2002 (NCAA).
• Since 1984, Cal women athletes have won 36 Olympic medals, including 17 gold medals.
• UC Berkeley women's teams have had 50 Top 10 national finishes over the past 10 years.
• Cal women’s teams have won 12 conference championships, had coaches win conference Coach of the Year 11 times and had female athletes win conference Player of the Year 12 times in just the past six years.
• Cal has 14 sports for women, which ranks second among Pac-10 schools. They are basketball, crew, cross country, field hockey, golf, gymnastics, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming & diving, tennis, track & field, volleyball and water polo.
• Cal currently has 370 female student-athletes, which ranks second in the Pac-10.
• Scholarship support for women athletes has more than doubled since 2000-2001, to more than $3.5 million per year. UC Berkeley's ability to recruit the finest student-athletes increased with significant growth in recruiting budgets for the women's programs last year.
• Half of the top administrators in the Cal athletics department are women. The department is led by Director of Athletics Sandy Barbour, who was recently honored as the Division I Administrator of the Year by the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators. As recently as six years ago, senior management in the department counted one woman among its ranks.
• Cal recently completed a comprehensive self-study of its athletics programs as part of its NCAA certification process. The portion of the report prepared by the Student Athlete Welfare and Equity Subcommittee chronicles significant improvement for women’s athletics since the previous report in 1997. Specifically, Cal has significantly enhanced training facilities for women’s sports, added new women’s sports and reinstated and expanded the scope of its Gender Equity and Diversity Committee to identify and address issues and concerns in this area.
• Cal is committed to further improving its athletics programs for women. One of the primary goals of building the new Student-Athlete High Performance Center is to provide better facilities and training opportunities for our women’s intercollegiate teams.