University of Denver Autumn 2024

ATHLETICS

How Far We’ve Come Celebrating 50 Years of Women’s Sports at DU

By Jordyn Reiland

“Be happy with what you have” is what women’s basketball head coach Doshia Woods recalls being told during her collegiate playing career in the late 90s and early 2000s. “I think then it was just a lot of ‘be grateful that you have the opportunity’,” Woods explains, referring to the chance to play basketball beyond high school. No longer is that the case. At a time when women’s sports are undeniably having a moment—at DU and across the country—Woods has seen that message she heard more than

two decades ago at Western Illinois University transform into something much greater. “Now female athletes are able to push the envelope a little bit more. You can say, ‘I’m grateful for this opportunity, but I also want to maximize the opportunity that I have,’ and they have a chance to do that,” Woods says, who will enter her fifth season at the helm of the women’s basketball team. Fifty years after women’s teams started competing at DU, it’s time to look back at how far we’ve come—and where we’re going from here.

Five Decades of Firsts

DU Athletics becomes a Division I program. Kutcher-Rinehart is hired as the head gymnastics coach.

Gymnastics becomes the first women’s program to be crowned national champions.

DU sanctions its first women’s varsity programs—basketball, field hockey, gymnastics, skiing and tennis—as members of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW).

1982

1999

Lacrosse has its first season.

1974

Gymnastics wins another national championship and becomes a Division I program in 1984—the first women’s sport to do so at Denver.

DU launches its varsity women’s swimming program. 1979

1992

Burns is inducted into the DU Sports Hall of Fame.

1997

1983

1970

1980

1990

1993

Basketball qualifies for the NCAA Division II Tournament for the first time.

Diane Wendt is appointed DU’s first director of women’s athletics and later as senior associate athletics director.

1981

Joy Burns becomes the first woman to chair the University’s Board of Trustees in 1981, serving as board chair from 1990-2005 and 2007-2009 before she retired in 2017.

1998 Golf enters its first season of competition.

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UNIVERSITY OF DENVER MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2024