BETTY LOGAN: SEIZING THE OPPORTUNITY
By Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com
After a sultry summer evening in 1997, watching local field hockey prospects play some pickup games at The Lawrenceville (N.J.) School, Betty Logan and The Founder sat down to a meal of ziti topped with marinara sauce, portobello mushrooms, red roasted peppers and artichoke hearts in an Italian restaurant a mile from where the games were played.
Knowing that Betty Logan died March 24, 1999, made writing this piece an difficult task. She gave so much to the game that it consumed her every waking moment. Her commitment to the game she loved should be an example to all who read the following.
Betty Logan's life was spent finding or creating opportunities where none existed. In athletics, she helped administer national championships in women's sports before the NCAA thought about sanctioning postseason field hockey or lacrosse tournaments.
She also provided opportunities for female athletes at Ramapo, Rutgers, and Princeton to grow and be nurtured in a climate where women would earn sometimes around ten cents on the dollar for what male coaches earned in the 1970s.
In her later years, she provided numerous young women in the Eastern United States with the opportunity to train at private camps, tournaments, and the National Futures Program.
But Logan's life outside of athletics was also filled with episodes in which she had to make opportunities for herself.
Logan grew up virtually without family. When she was an infant, she was removed from the custody of her parents, who lived in Birmingham, England by decree of the British government. At the time, the early 1940s, all children were removed from England and located away from places where the German Luftwaffe could cause human collateral damage thanks to nightly bombing raids that terrified one of the last European outposts not occupied by the Axis powers.
Young Betty grew up in a series of orphanages in Scotland, never knowing the fate of her family. She lived as a transient, never quite knowing exactly where she would be living from year to year.
One attribute, however, shone brightly: her athleticism. She was one of the best young track stars in all of Scotland, and also made the senior reserve national team of Scotland.
She made opportunities for herself in athletics, and was able to graduate from the Dunfermline College of Physical Education in 1963. Two years later, at the age of 24, she came to the United States. On these shores, she was able to create opportunities for herself she could never find in the British Isles.
"The British philosophy is very different," Logan said. "I could never build my life around field hockey there like I did here. Not a chance: it would be a sideline."
Logan began her coaching career in the United States with an ambitious assignment. In the mid-1960s, she held simultaneous coaching positions at The Kimberley School and Montclair State College. Given today's rules about college coaches' contacts with scholastic athletes, Logan's dual coaching role is unheard of.
"We played a couple of games a week (at Kimberley)," Logan said. "Things were so much lower key back then: we practiced six days a week."
Then, when she was still coaching at the state college level, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was passed. It was the beginning of a boom in women's athletics in the United States, mandating that schools and colleges fund men's and women's athletic programs on more or less an equal basis.
"But I think that, maybe, the law was misused," Logan said. "More and more schools have been adding women's sports ... and there is a limit to now many sports you can offer. You can wind up catering to anyone on a campus who wants to play tiddly-winks as a varsity sport. I mean, Title IX assumes that if you have 43 percent of your enrollment as female, that 43 percent of (a school's female athletes) will want to be involved in sports, and that's wrong. I think the original intent was to give women the opportunity to play sports, not to ram it down their throats: 'You will have a crew team.' "
Four years after the passage of Title IX, Logan took over the helm of field hockey and women's lacrosse at Rutgers University. While coaching there, she helped assemble national championship tournaments in both sports, since the National Collegiate Athletic Association did not sanction championships for those endeavors.
It was not until her tenure at Princeton University that field hockey and lacrosse finally became NCAA-sanctioned sports.
Throughout her college coaching career, she noticed a gradually higher level of sophistication in terms of scouting, player development, and coaching techniques. And, for those, full-time coaching was an opportunity she took.
"I was on release-time as a Rutgers faculty member," Logan said, "and that was one reason I went to Princeton. I just didn't have the time to recruit, and Rutgers did not want to commit to a full-time coaching position. I would have stayed at Rutgers if they would have made me full-time."
By then, however, field hockey was a sport whose stakes were much higher in terms of the competition amongst teams both on the field and off. It took a while, however, for assistant coaches to receive full-time status and for full scholarships, comparable to other sports, to make their presence known in field hockey and lacrosse.
"I didn't have full-time assistants, so I was doing (recruitment) myself," Logan recalled. "And when (Princeton lacrosse coach) Chris (Sailer) came in, she was my assistant for field hockey, and I was her assistant in lacrosse."
But in the mid-1990s, many U.S. college coaching staffs became independent from each other, including several in the Ivy League.
"(Coaching opportunities) are getting better and better," Logan said. "But there was also a philosphical switch. The emphasis was clearly the bottom line."
Logan was beginning to get those messages in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ivy teams had won NCAA Division I national championships in men's ice hockey and women's lacrosse, and there was a push among many Ivy schools to improve their programs immediately.
"The Ivy philosophy was one I really subscribed to, in that participation was the No. 1 priority, along with doing well within the Ivy League," Logan said. "That very subtly started to shift, and the time came for me to move on, because I wasn't into that. My kids were getting out of it a very healthy perspective, and we were doing well."
Ivy sports teams were beginning to feel the pressure to win as much as big-time scholarship programs. Logan knew that there was a day when she woke up and found that going to work as a full-time college coach was no longer as fun or productive as it once was.
"There was a generation gap between me and the kids," Logan says. "We weren't on the same wavelength anymore."
Logan does not begrudge Princeton for making the changes that it did, both in its bottom-line philosophy and in finding its new field hockey coach.
"I had a lot of concerns as a coach as to how the teams, in general, were being treated, men's teams and women's teams alike," Logan said. "I wanted to have a coaching committee to talk about admissions and financial aid, streamlining the system. We were all working in our own little foxholes, never talking to anybody else about them, duplicating our efforts. It was just getting to be a hassle."
But she could not help noticing that with the ascension of Beth Bozman as head coach, the Tigers made three consecutive Final Fours between 1996 and 1998.
"They're doing well on the field," Logan asked, "but what's the cost?"
She could have felt bitter about the way in which she was eased out of her coaching situation, but she would make it to many a Princeton home game.
"It was the right move at the right time for me, because I knew I would not be happy in this college environment -- too pressure-ridden, and too intense," Logan said. "I enjoy the purity of the game too much to be spoiled by all of that."
And Logan also confessed to developing a certain hatred for the two-inch think book of NCAA regulations.
"Part of the reason that the women have had to abide by these stupid NCAA rules is that the men kept on breaking them. And when they were broken, the NCAA had to write all these new ones," she said. "And that's how the rulebook got so fat."
But with rules, there were plenty of loopholes that coaches -- football, basketball, and field hockey alike -- could drive trucks through.
"Now they have all these recruiting seasons, and dead periods," Logan said. "I think it's healthy to keep coaches away from the high school kids in their junior year. But they find a way: I see it in field hockey."
Logan believed that the regulations -- and their loopholes -- allowed the primary recruiting of American field hockey talent to move from high-school games to the National Festival and National Futures Tournament. There are wall-to-wall coaches at both USFHA-sanctioned events, and coaches compete there for the attention of the prospects -- sometimes to an extreme degree.
"There was one year where there was a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend," she said. "Now, as a coach, they have to know where you're from, so you wear something with the name of your college on it. There were two coaches who were strutting around in these big, black rain jackets -- insulated, no less -- in Florida, and you couldn't miss the name of the school on them. That started the shift for the colleges to the Futures tournament and the National Festival."
The departure from Princeton meant that Logan had another opportunity to give back to the game she loved. She umpired in the Mercer and Middlesex chapters in central New Jersey, and administered some Garden State Games competitions and the New Jersey Futures program.
"The game has changed so much, and I've been excited about it," Logan said. "The things the young kids do nowadays are things I didn't even do as a player!"
There were times, however, when the coaching instincts came out.
"At first, it was very hard for me to view the game from the perspective of a coach," Logan said. "I was enamored with what the kids would do, that I would sometimes forget to blow my whistle."
There is also the old story where Logan was umpiring a middle-school lacrosse game which involved some rather sloppy defense on the part of both teams. A few minutes into the contest, she blew her whistle and crossed her wrists to stop the clock.
"Does anyone here know what shooting space is?" she could be heard admonishing the players.
But she found a niche teaching outside of her umpiring duties in field hockey and lacrosse. Logan taught many dozens of players in New Jersey and elsewhere, thanks to the Newtown Field Hockey Camps which she began in Newtown, Pa. and Blairstown, N.J.
It is from her years of observation of the game in the United States that she has seen some things amiss in the development of the game in the United States. One is the lack of current and correct information about national development camps.
"In all of the calls I get from parents in all of the ways I am involved in field hockey, they say, 'How am I supposed to know about these things?' " says Logan. "There has to be a central clearinghouse for all of these opportunities. There are a lot of people who know about Futures tryouts only after they take place. And that's a pity."
She also sees a lack of volunteer participation in field hockey, especially compared to the level of football booster clubs and Little League parent groups.
"If there are 300 high schools that play field hockey in New Jersey, and we get half of those coaches and their assistants to volunteer for one event a year -- whether it be a mini-program in their town, or Futures, whatever -- we would have more people than we would know what to do with," Logan said. "It would be incredible: and it would be one event a year. There has to be a way to do it: some people get so complacent and so tucked away in their school."
Logan believes that there is a direct correlation between volunteerism and improvement in not only coaching, but the general acceptance of the sport in a local community.
"Some of these high-school coaches don't have a clue about what is really going on," she said. "I set up all of these coaching clinics, and I just hope that they will continue some of this stuff afterwards. I only have three hours with them."
While Logan always wanted to see a stronger grass-roots develop between schools and the U.S. national team, she did not want to see professionalism in the game she loved.
"If that happens, I might just get out of the sport altogether," she said. "It would be a jungle out there. I recognize that I am a purist; kind of a Pollyanna. But I make no apologies for that: that's how I got into the sport. I just loved to play. That was it. And to think I could ever earn a living from field hockey was the furthest thing from my mind."