Packed and energized sporting arenas. Clinching the closing medal ceremony of the Olympics for the first time. Primetime broadcasts with viewership in the many millions—women’s sports are starting to get the time and attention they’ve deserved all along.
At UMBC, our women athletes have been gathering championship rings and lifting each other up along the way. You’re invited to join the stands and cheer on these world-class Retrievers.
By Kara Newhouse
The women of the UMBC volleyball team stood at the edge of their home court with eyes toward the rafters. To the right of the American and Maryland flags hung two banners with black cloths draped over them. The home opener match of the 2024 season would start soon, but first, a bit of pomp and circumstance for the Retrievers who won the past four America East Conference tournaments.
A game announcer directed attention to a massive video screen which showed senior Mila Ilieva, economics, blocking a hit and clinching a 3-0 sweep of the Binghamton Bearcats in the 2023 championship. On the floor, current players grinned, reliving their victory as triumphant music kicked on. All eyes returned to the rafters and up went the black cloths to reveal two black and gold banners listing the volleyball team’s three regular season titles and four tournament wins.
On its way up, one cloth got stuck, hanging at an angle as the players turned for a photo and a crew in the rafters fixed it. Not the smoothest of unveilings, but it was perhaps reflective of the trajectory of women’s sports in this country, a path punctuated by moments of great promise—the passage of Title IX, packed crowds at the 1999 Women’s World Cup, Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky’s medal dominance at the Rio Olympics—but often regressing to the status quo as a “niche interest” ignored by investors and corporate broadcasters.
This year, however, the veil keeping women’s sports from mainstream popularity has finally lifted. The final game of 2024 NCAA women’s March Madness netted over 18 million average viewers—4 million more than the men’s final. At the Paris Olympics, the women’s marathon medals were given during the closing ceremony instead of the men’s for the first time. Professional leagues are smashing attendance records and making expansion plans.
As a recent viral T-shirt declares: Everyone watches women’s sports. And Retriever athletics is full of women worth watching. In addition to volleyball victories, UMBC boasts four consecutive America East championships in softball. Swimming alumna Emily Escobedo ’17, finished third in the 200-meter breaststroke at NCAA championships as a Retriever and later won a world championship in the same event. The lacrosse team is coached by a hall-of-famer. Shot putter Cleopatra Borel ’02, was the college’s first national champion and competed in four Olympics for Trinidad and Tobago. That’s just what’s in the record books. At UMBC, student-athletes are also supported as teammates, scholars, and aspiring leaders. Are you watching with us?
It’s electric
For Kennedy Lamb ’20, English, the recent popularity of women’s sports is overdue. “It’s about time these women’s sports teams, especially at UMBC, get that attention,” said Lamb, who won an America East championship with Retriever softball in 2019.
During her time as a student-athlete, Lamb experienced a similar change in viewership to what’s happening nationally. She remembers looking out from the diamond as a first-year student to see just a few parents. “We love the parents, but you always wish that maybe another sports team or maybe a friend or someone from your math class would show up,” she said. Over the ensuing years, as the softball team turned into a winning one, her wish came true. “By the time I was a senior, the hill was filled.”
Lamb got a reminder of how that felt when she attended a Washington Mystics game against the Indiana Fever, the team on which mega-popular Caitlin Clark plays. Both times the Fever came to Washington, the arena sold out. Lamb said her friends and family who are longtime WNBA fans recalled how they used to get cheap tickets to games with middling attendance. “Now it was this sought after activity. Tickets were expensive. And seeing the electricity in the stadium reminded me of the electricity
of being on the UMBC softball team,” Lamb said.
Clark’s celebrity drew large crowds across WNBA cities this year, but it wasn’t only the Clark effect bringing people in. The New York Liberty, for instance, averaged the second highest home attendance in the regular season with 12,700 fans. Five years ago, the Liberty’s home game average was 2,200 fans.
For Tiffany D. Tucker, UMBC’s new director of athletics, physical education, and recreation, the popularity of the WNBA and other women’s sports is payoff from decades of work by athletes, coaches, executives, fans, investors, and allies. It’s not that the product on the floor changed, but “sometimes people need an invitation,” Tucker said. “It’s as if they’ve been peeping in, and it’s like, ‘I want to be a part of it,’ and now everybody feels like they’ve been invited and that they’re a part of the team.”
As she dives into her new role, she plans to extend the same invitation for all to watch UMBC women’s athletics.
A relational environment
After the volleyball banner ceremony, Tucker sat at center court with President Valerie Sheares Ashby to watch the contest against
Lehigh University.
“Let’s go, Serin! You got it!” the athletics director called as setter Serin Maden, an economics junior, stepped up for a serve.
A former basketball coach who once aspired to be an author and international speaker, Tucker’s voice carried easily over the cacophony of the crowd and thwacks of palms smacking leather.
“Let’s go, Jada!” she called shortly after Maden’s serve. “Let’s go, Aysia!” a few minutes later.
Tucker was less than four weeks into the job. Asked how many names she’d learned in those weeks, she exhaled.
“I try to get them all, I try,” she said. Counting both men and women
student-athletes, that’s almost 400 names. “I’m going team by team,”
Tucker added with a deep laugh.
At once the mark of a good leader, Tucker’s effort is also a benefit of UMBC’s size. “When you’re a student-athlete at a smaller, mid-major institution, you may know the name [of administrators], or you may know where the offices are to certain resources,” Tucker said.
“These are the same people who are here to support our women’s sporting events. These are people who are readily there to help you, not that they’re not there at a larger institution, but because of the size of the institution, I think it’s a little bit more intimate and relational.”
In the grind together
In the stands behind Tucker, a row of preteen girls got into the Retriever spirit, barking loudly to support the home team. Sporting shiny red jerseys, these girls were volleyball players from Shepherdstown Middle School in West Virginia, attending their first college game. Though the Retrievers lost, the match was “really fun” and “cool,” the girls said with big smiles afterward. Their favorite part? “The rallies,” according to one. “Yeah, the rallies!” another girl echoed.
A third player had a different thought. “The way they supported each other,” she said. “They huddled after every point and high fived and cheered for each other.” At this, the rest of the tweens bobbed their heads in agreement and declared that they wanted to take that back to their own matches.
That kind of support cuts across sports at UMBC. “There’s this camaraderie when you’re all together, day in day out, waking up at 5:30 for practice,” said Lamb, who is the godmother to the child of one of her former softball teammates. “It’s one thing to have great friends who you see in your English class, but ultimately you don’t grind with them. Being a DI athlete is a grind. You have no choice but to lean on others. You can’t do it alone. And that’s a type of friendship that isn’t found everywhere.”
Aysia Miller ’24, biological sciences, knows something about grinding with teammates. She won four America East championships in volleyball with four different pathways to the trophy. Her first year, the Retrievers were the underdogs facing the heavyweight University of Albany. Her sophomore year, the team blew out everyone in conference play but struggled in the tournament. Her junior year, they started the season strong but hit a losing stretch midway. Her senior year was the magic one.
“It was just like everything was clicking, and it was honestly pretty perfect,” said Miller, who is now a master’s student in applied molecular biology. With an extra year of athletic eligibility because of COVID-19, Miller has the unusual opportunity to achieve a five-peat. But the team struggled at the start of the season, losing nine in a row.
After the Lehigh match, Miller said she and her teammates knew they needed to improve. “Ultimately, I do believe that culturally our team is in a good spot. We have each other’s backs,” she said. “No one is turning on each other, and we’re not blaming one another about losing, about not things not going our way. And it kind of all comes down to what are our values as a team, what’s important, and how we’re able to treat each other.”
Open doors
Shared values can be the difference between a thriving locker room and a toxic one. During the women’s basketball preseason, the team spent an afternoon defining and performing skits about the core values posted in their locker room: service, toughness, family, loyalty, commitment, and consistency.
Team bonding activities like that one, as well as movie nights, a trip to the state fair, and the thrill of competition are what motivated Riley Donahue ’24, political science, to stay for another year as a master’s student in public policy. As a transfer student, Donahue has experienced multiple sets of coaches. From her perspective, positive culture starts at the top, and she loves the tone set by Coach Candice Hill and her staff. “They want to make sure everybody’s OK, and they have an open door policy if you need to come and talk to them,” Donahue said.
“I want to fill the stands. I want women athletes to really feel their value and know that they are loved.”
— Tiffany D. Tucker,
athletics director
Hill isn’t the only coach with that policy. “By open door, I mean literally anyone walks through our door,” said Amy Slade, the women’s lacrosse head coach entering her 17th season with the Retrievers. “We could be meeting with a recruit, and someone walks in and we’re like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’”
Slade and her staff hold monthly “coaches’ corner” meetings with each player. The young women may discuss lighthearted topics, like their favorite TV shows. Or they may share serious matters, like a parent’s cancer diagnosis. In either case, Slade said her goal is not to solve their problems, but to validate emotions and offer mom hugs, tough love, or referrals to mental health professionals as needed. “We’re making time each month just for you. And I think that’s important,” said Slade, who was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2021.
While coaches keep doors open for student-athletes to come inward, the rest of the college opens doors to go outward and excel beyond their sports. Players and staff are proud that academics get just as much emphasis as athletics at UMBC. That’s what drew Donahue here from Auburn University as a junior. Right away, Donahue jumped into an internship fair that led to working on Brooke Lierman’s successful campaign for Maryland Comptroller. The following spring, she interned in the Maryland legislature for Delegate Cheryl Pasteur.
“It was a haul to Annapolis,” Donahue said, but she paid for gas with money she earns from NIL (name, image, likeness) deals. “It was really fun to sit in on judicial hearings, to walk through the Senate building …and I enjoyed being around it and helping draft bills, helping make scholarships for students.”
Donahue is president of UMBC’s Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) and the America East chair for the NCAA Division 1 SAAC. Eventually, she wants to be president of the United States. “This place challenges you academically, and that’s what I want. Because the career that I want to go into is not going to be easy,” she said.
“Just come and play”
Women’s sports have a long history at UMBC, thanks in large part to Linda “Louie” Sowers ’70, American studies. Sowers, who played volleyball in high school, arrived at UMBC in its inaugural 1966 semester. Looking around campus, she found something missing: women’s sports. So in her second year, she approached athletic director Dick Watts with a request to change that. “I was a little sophomore, and he was an intimidating person…so it took a lot of courage for me just to go in there and ask,” she recalled.
Five years before Title IX mandated equality of athletic opportunities among other things, many male athletic directors might have brushed off Sowers’ request. But according to Sowers, Watts handed her a piece of paper and asked her to get signatures of female students who wanted to play sports. If she gathered enough names, he would hire a volleyball coach.
Sowers took that paper to the cafeteria, located in one of the only campus buildings at the time. “I basically just, in between classes, went up and down all the tables and got as many girls as I could,” Sowers recalled. “I had girls that said ‘I’ve never played before,’ and I would say, ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Just come and play.’”
She collected 66 signatures, and Watts hired a volleyball coach that spring. The next fall, Watts added a women’s athletic director, plus field hockey and basketball teams. “Because we were such a small school…it was like this little core group of us that wound up playing all three sports,” Sowers said. More than 50 years later, she still attends Ravens games with one of those friends and keeps in touch with others by text and email.
Fill the stands
In Sowers’ day, spectators included just a few parents and male athletes. Even today, crowds tend to follow a team’s success. Teams that have yet to lift trophies said they’re still hoping to see more fans.
One misty September night at Retriever Soccer Park as the women’s team mounted a comeback win over Mount St. Mary’s, parents in slickers and some fellow student-athletes—including Miller—cheered from wet bleachers. One dad rang a cowbell after every Retrievers play. Center fullback Lauren Reid, psychology and visual arts, said she’s grateful for family support but wished more peers would show up.
Reid knows how it feels to put on her cleats for a packed house. Last June she traveled to soccer-mad Brazil as a member of the Jamaican women’s national team. When Brazilian legend Marta took the field, the energy shift was incredible, Reid said. “I think it would give us the same feeling here if our whole student body was showing up,” she continued.
Tucker, too, said she wants to see growth in crowds to mirror what’s happening at a national level: “I want to fill the stands. I want women athletes to really feel their value and know that they are loved.”
Tucker plans to personally visit rotary clubs, local churches, schools, and others to extend the invitation. She wants to saturate the community with her message about Retriever women’s athletics.
“We have some of the best scholars. We have some of the best athletes in the country right here on our campus, and they’re passionate about what they do. They’re very disciplined. And it’s fun. It’s action-packed. It’s right here in your backyard,” Tucker said.
Consider yourself invited.
Tags: Athletics, Fall 2024, Feature, student-athlete
