Dawn Chuck - Ivy@50

"We live in a different world in the Caribbean," asserts Dawn Chuck. "I hadn't heard of Brown, didn't know it was in the Ivy League."

Brown, however, had heard of Dawn Chuck.

A competitive swimmer in Jamaica since the age of six, Chuck was attending a stroke clinic given by a visiting American coach, arranged by her longtime coach, Jacqueline Walter. Her coach had an ulterior motive in arranging the stroke clinic. "She wanted me to go to college in the U.S." says Chuck. "She thought the facilities were better."

The American coach mentioned he could pass Chuck's name on to college coaches, and soon Brown coach Matt Kredich invited her on a recruiting trip. "I loved everything about the school and team," says Chuck, "I knew that I wanted to swim throughout my college career but also be able to focus on my academics, so Matt and the swimming program at Brown definitely had a great impact on my decision." She decided on Brown, turning aside offers from Villanova University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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Ellie Daniel - Ivy@50

Ellie Daniel, a 1976 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and one of the Ivy League's most decorated Olympians, credits learning to swim at the relatively late age of 11 with helping her make the decision on her own that it was something she really wanted to do. A few years later, when she went with her father to watch the National AAU championships in Philadelphia, near her hometown of Abington, Pa., the die was cast.

"You know how kids are hero-worshippers?" she was quoted as saying in the May 1973 Pennsylvania Gazette. "Well, I decided right then that I was going to be like them. I was going to be an Olympic medal-winner."

That determination took her through years of training with Philadelphia's renowned Vesper Boat Club, starting out with the B team - which meant swimming in what she calls "a dump" at the aquarium, underneath the art museum. A year late, she was promoted to the A team, which practiced at the University of Pennsylvania's Weightman Hall pool and was coached by Mary Kelly (then the wife of Jack, brother of Princess Grace of Monaco).

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Marcia Cleveland - Ivy@50

Fewer than 800 people have successfully navigated the waters of the English Channel since 1875. On July 29, 1994, former Yale swimmer Marcia Cleveland became the 445th. The journey -- 23.69 miles in choppy, 58-degree waters -- took nine hours and 44 minutes.

For many, a tedious, exhausting adventure of that magnitude would be the culmination of years of training and preparation. For Cleveland, it was just one of many achievements on a remarkable swimming resume.

Cleveland first learned to swim at 18 months and has rarely been out of the water since. A captain of the swim team at Greenwich High School in the early 1980s, her team went undefeated in her final two seasons as she earned All-America status.

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Cristina Teuscher - Ivy@50

It was a decision that shocked everyone in the swimming establishment, or at least everyone who didn't know Cristina Teuscher.

Already among the most versatile swimmers in the world, she decided in 1996 to make Columbia University -- a school with little history of swimming success to that point -- her collegiate home. She had been to all the 'name' schools, but the trips all ended the same way: with Cristina coming back home and saying she didn't feel comfortable. But Columbia felt different.

A number of college coaches said she was effectively hanging up her suit, intimating that she could never keep pace with the world's best if she wasn't swimming against them on a daily basis. Her mother, Monica, said that one newspaper called her crazy for letting her daughter cast aside either a full college scholarship or the endorsement money Cristina would have made as a professional.

"We didn't want to sell our daughter to a school," Monica says. "I told her, 'Forget the money and go where you want.' Looking back it was the best decision we ever made."

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