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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Peggy Walbridge - Ivy@50

Tell Cornell's Peggy Walbridge that she is Cornell's greatest woman fencer and she's quick to disagree. "No I'm not. Grace Acel was. She was phenomenal." Indeed, Acel's accomplishments are impressive, with two national fencing championships in 1942-43. Cornell had an even earlier repeat women's national fencing champion, Elizabeth Ross, in 1930-31. Karen Denton also reigned as national champion in 1968.

"In the 1960s Cornell had a very good team," explains Walbridge. "[Michel] Sebastiani (the recently-retired Princeton coach, then Cornell's coach) was responsible for making Cornell's teams so strong."

Walbridge benefited from the growing strength of Cornell's program, for she did not fence competitively in high school. "I went to an all-girls school," she remembers, "and played on any and every team that I could get on." But there was no fencing team, and Walbridge chose Cornell "because it would be the biggest challenge for me personally, and it had a very strong liberal arts college." Fencing was not a factor.

Her initiation to Cornell fencing was inauspicious. "I was horrible, laughable freshman year, won very few bouts," she says. But by sophomore year Walbridge, and her team, hit its stride. "Our team flattened just about everyone we fenced," she says. "We won every team match our sophomore to senior seasons, by scored of 15-1, 16-0. The least we won was by 12-4." The Cornell women's fencing team won the 1972-73 national championships, and barely lost the 1974 title.

For Stephen Eschenbach's full story, please visit Ivy@50.

Mary Jane O'Neill - Ivy@50

The Lajos Csiszar women's fencing trophy, awarded to the Ivy League's women's champion team, is modeled on Penn Athletic Hall of Famer and two-time Olympian Mary Jane O'Neill. "The trophy was donated by a Penn alum," O'Neill modestly recalls, "and I was picked as the most notorious Penn fencer."

She was at Harvard Medical School at the time and the sculptor, Timothy Maslin, went to her in Boston. "He did two or three sessions," she says, "and made me stay in a lunge position for 10 minutes at a time, which is as long as I could stand."

Initiated into fencing as a junior at Concord-Carlisle High School in Massachusetts, O'Neill joined an illustrious program. Though she took to the sport right away she fenced in the shadow of younger teammate Caitlin Bilodeau, who won two junior national championships before moving on to Columbia University.

The two met again in college -- with O'Neill winning the NCAA individual title in 1984 while Bilodeau took it in 1985 and 1987. Incredibly, the two fencers followed another Concord-Carlisle grad, Columbia Hall of Famer Lisa Piazza.

Bilodeau and O'Neill were reunited at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, when they fenced on the foil squad. "Our teams did well," remembers O'Neill. "I like team competition even though mine is an individual sport."

For Suzanne Eschenbach's full story, please visit Ivy@50.

Maya Lawrence - Ivy@50

Maya Lawrence is in Europe, working as an "assistante d'angalis" at a lycee (fix) (high school) in Paris, through a program administered by the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. She's also training with some of the world's best fencers in preparation for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China.

It's a hard path -- competing on a world-class level in preparation for the Olympics, while beginning as a teacher of English as a second language. And Lawrence could have picked an easier venue for this training. When she arrived in France in September 2005 she "didn't know the language. If you start [speaking] in English they get mad at you," she says, "but if you try first in French they're fine."

But then Lawrence is used to this dual path. Perhaps it started when she chose to attend Princeton. A native of Teaneck, N.J., she believes "almost every student in New Jersey knows about Princeton!" For her, the decision to go was because "it has a stellar academic reputation, but fencing was also a factor in my decision. It seemed natural to choose the school with the best of both worlds."

Arriving at Princeton in the fall of 1998, Lawrence immediately started her athletic and academic tracks. Fencing began slowly until long-time Princeton coach Michael Sebastiani suggested she had the potential to become a champion -- if she committed to a more rigorous training regimen that combined both conditioning and fencing fundamentals.

For Stephen Eschenbach's full story, please visit Ivy@50.