This month, Yale Athletics is honoring some of the Trailblazers for our women's teams. Bonnie (Jackson) Kestner '74 was the first varsity captain of the women's swimming and diving program in 1973-74, while Roseanne Marcus Riddick '76 served the next two seasons. Both were kind enough to share their memories of the early days.
 
Bonnie Jackson Kestner '74

I remember choosing Yale largely because of the reputation of its illustrious swimming program.  Yale Swimming had been at the top of the nation in the NCAAs and had a number of Olympians in its ranks. I was fairly new to competitive swimming, having begun only in ninth grade when my high school started a swim team.  I thought I would be likely to improve a great deal in a program like Yale's, and I was not disappointed.  In my first two years, 1970-72, I was the only female competitive swimmer, and Coach Phil Moriarty permitted me to train with the men—what a privilege and honor!  
 
I challenged myself to prove that I could handle the workouts and remember working very hard in Coach Moriarty's preseason bodybuilding sessions.  We would do step-ups on a bench to the cadence of Phil's bamboo pole that seemed endless, and then go into a demanding set of exercises challenging every muscle in our bodies.  To supplement this, I would go to the weight room on off days and work on the pulley machines.  At that time, it was unusual for women to be working out with weights and the men didn't seem to know what to make of it.  In the pool, I would swim fast in warmup, trying to outpace the men.  

 

Phil Moriarty paved the way for a women's club team to be formed in 1972-73.  First year butterfly standout Rosanne Marcus and I competed in the AIAW National Meet in Moscow Idaho, chaperoned by a Princeton University Athletic Director Merrily Dean as Yale did not have a coach who could accompany us.  In 1973-74 we became a varsity under coach Ed Bettendorf.  I captained the team and Rosanne took over as captain for the next two years while I served as assistant coach under Ed.  I recall competing successfully at the AIAW Nationals at Penn State my senior year and traveling there and back in a 15-passenger van.  It was a humble beginning, and I am proud of how the program has grown and developed into a force to be reckoned with in the Ivy League.
 
A great strength of the program is the family atmosphere that has characterized it from the outset.  In 2017 a few of us "old timers" spent an afternoon with the coaches and current men's and women's team members.  It was inspiring to see the rigorous training regimen and to catch a glimpse of the bonding and camaraderie fostered by the coaches and team leaders.  I feel incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity to be on the "ground floor" of this remarkable program.
 
My Yale Swimming experience taught me the value of hard work and discipline.  I loved the sport and decided to make a career of coaching and athletics. For 37 years I taught and coached at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, developing a strong Division III program in my early years there.  I held other positions also, as Athletic Director, President of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference and member of the NCAA Swimming and Diving Committee.  For some of those years I competed in U.S. Master's competitions, setting records locally in my age group.  
 
My interests have broadened into areas such as wellness and nutrition, and I developed and taught nutrition-related courses at Sweet Briar.  I also pursued a musical interest, studying organ for a number of years and am now serving as organist at two small local churches.  My husband and I raised two children, both of whom were accomplished high school athletes.   

Rosanne Marcus Riddick '76
 
In 1969, I was a competitive swimmer for The Portland (ME) Boys Club coed AAU team. I had qualified to swim in a Region I Senior Championship at Yale. I had chills entering the Kiphuth Exhibition Pool.  The pool felt so fast and I did my best time by a lot in the 100 fly. At that moment, I vowed to come to Yale to swim in college.  Someone then pointed out to me that there were no women at Yale (at the time), let alone a swim team. That did not deter me and by the fall of '72, my dream had come true. I had never even done a campus tour before showing up in New Haven; what else did I need after seeing what was inside the Payne Whitney Gym?
 
I had been a counselor at Camp Ak-O-Mak (known for swimming and competitive canoeing) in Canada the summer after high school graduation, and the camp director called ahead to Phil Moriarty, the Yale men's coach, to ask if I could train with the men in the fall.  I had been actually been mentally prepared to hang up my suit since training without a team did not appeal to me. My high school team had been state champions and we had so much fun as a team.  Because that team only had practice twice a week, I had asked to swim at the boys' practices (they had five a week).  While it was good to have more training, it was overall a negative social experience and I wasn't eager to do it again.
 
However, I thought I would give it a try after I found out that Bonnie Jackson '74 would also be doing the same.  My first practice was a morning one and I was assigned a lane with a male swimmer who, the previous spring, had been an NCAA champion.  I was so intimidated that I swam too close to my side of the lane, injuring myself hitting the lane line for an hour and a half. To my surprise, though, he was a true gentleman and was very welcoming to me.  I almost could not believe my luck; I had died and gone to heaven! Bonnie and I also took advantage of the team's bodybuilding sessions in the fall and I loved the great training in the pool. 
 
I swam in one men's meet-a JV meet against a prep school. Needless to say, it was not inspiring at all.  I could not envision doing another year of swimming without a women's team.  While so much of that year was positive and most of the men's team and staff were supportive of us, when taper time came around in February, a negative experience solidified my desire to have a team of our own.  
 
Luckily, the men's assistant, Ed Bettendorf, was planning on helping to create a women's club team the next fall.  We were able to put together a collection of people from many swimming backgrounds.  Some had been serious swimmers who had retired early and others hadn't yet tasted the competitive swimming life. Despite the mix of backgrounds, we trained very hard, inspired by Yale's swimming tradition that now we could be a full-fledged part of. Though we weren't a good team at that point, (losing to a New Haven high school team), I tried to instill the team spirit I had known as a high-schooler. We tried to add our stamp on Yale Swimming by coming out on deck singing "Bulldogs!" The men's team laughed at us, which was all we needed to continue to build our team ethic and who we would become. We all certainly wanted to uphold the legacy of Yale's illustrious swimming past; we showed it by never missing practice, training hard, but also paving the way for future teams.
 
We were treated fairly well by Yale.  We had the advantage of a facility that already had women's locker rooms. We had all the practice time we needed and the financial support to travel.  We started to get better and beat college teams, including Harvard, who was still competing as Radcliffe. The team got bigger and by the time I was going into senior year, we had a recruiting budget.
 
I can only recall one incident where we skirmished with the Yale administration.  It pales in comparison to the Women's Crew stripping naked in front of Joni Barnett, the women's AD, and calling the New York Times to cover it.  I was jealous of them and their guts, but they were treated very badly by the men's crew and Yale. With us, it was relatively benign, but we felt we needed to stand our ground.  We were asked to have "punch and cookies" with our opponents after our meets.  We were appalled since we hated teams like Princeton and Harvard as we had been taught since entering Yale. I would certainly be cordial on the pool deck at a championship meet, but I was not in favor of socializing with our rivals after meets and neither was our coach. I told him that when the football team had punch and cookies after their games with Harvard and Princeton, we would follow suit. To me, it illustrated a small chasm in how we looked at women's sports and how the women's AD looked at it.  We just wanted to be respected for our competitiveness and our hard work. We wanted to add to the Yale tradition but not in that way.

My senior year, we added our first big recruiting class.  We had to teach them how to get to morning practices and make it academically. They brought our competitive level up a couple of notches, and by 1978, the team had won its first Ivy Championship.  I walked a few miles to that meet at Harvard right after the Blizzard of '78 to see how far we had come. 
 
In the early '80s, at the beginning of my career in finance, I had to opportunity to start a girls' high school team in Lowell, Mass, which at that point had only one active girls' sports team.  I taught them what Ed Bettendorf had taught me, and I carried over the spirit and enthusiasm I had learned in high school and at Yale.  I was fortunate to coach 13 eventual college captains.  After a lot of years in finance, I am planning on pivoting to other avenues, including some aspect of environmentalism. I got back into swimming for exercise a few years back, but also participate in golf, paddle boarding, and biking. My husband, Ray, who played football at Yale, and who was our first Yale women's team manager in 1973-74, passed away in 2015. He introduced the team to the football training tables at Commons after practices and inspired us to create our own Mory's traditions after season-end. We have a daughter who played all-girls flag football, volleyball, softball, and also loved swimming for her state championship high school team.  She's been to the Kiphuth pool to watch the Yale women and peruse the Yale Olympian mural and can understand how I could be completely mesmerized back in 1969.