Princeton University Athletics
Knocked From The Record Book After 23 Years, Dr. Sue Mooney's Legacy In The Evolution Of Women's Soccer At Princeton Is Safe Forever
November 04, 2004 | General
Nov. 4, 2004
Esmeralda Negron's third goal against Cornell on Oct. 29 was her 14th of the season for the Princeton women's soccer team. In addition to helping the Tigers salt away another Ivy League championship, the goal also knocked Sue Mooney '85 out of the Princeton record book, a place Mooney had been for 23 years.
Of course, Mooney had no idea she was in the record book in the first place, not for one minute of those 23 years.
Mooney scored 13 goals in 1981, the second season of varsity women's soccer at Princeton University. It was the most goals any Princeton woman had scored in a season at the time, and no Princeton player was able to catch her until Negron equaled it last year and bettered it this year.
"When we were playing, I didn't even know there was a record book," Mooney, an ob-gyn who lives near Dartmouth these days and spends her life "delivering babies," says. "Things have changed so dramatically over the years. It was just a different world back then."
Mooney's story speaks volumes about women's soccer at Princeton and women's athletics in general. She is reluctant to call herself a pioneer, and she sees nothing heroic about what she and her teammates did in those early days.
"We just wanted to play soccer," she says. "We were just happy that we had the chance to play at all."
Still, the contrast between today's player like Negron and the players of Mooney's era is startling. Today's women's players can play in the Olympic Development Program before they ever get to high school, and coaches can flock to numerous events all over the country to see the best players. Negron herself represented the United States on the Under-21 national team this past summer in Iceland.
Mooney grew up in Princeton playing on boys' teams, because there were no girls' teams on which she could play. Among the boys she played with was Ron Celestin, another Princeton High alum who today is an assistant coach to Julie Shackford for the Princeton women's team.
"To me, it's really been gratifying to see how far women's athletics has come along," she says."It's not like we cropped up out of the blue. There were girls who played before us. We didn't look at it like we were doing anything impressive. We were looking at it like we got to play soccer, and that's something we loved to do."
Bob Malekoff, the first coach of the varsity women's soccer team at Princeton, convinced Mooney to stay near home and attend Princeton.
"I was recruited as much as recruiting was done back then," said Mooney. "The team had just gone varsity then. Things were starting to happen. Bob brought in me and Lynette Prescott and Kerry Shaw. We all played together as freshmen."
Princeton women's soccer has had two exceptional eras in its 25 seasons. The second one is the current one under Shackford, who has taken the Tigers to the last five NCAA tournaments and who will lead the team into the 2004 tournament later this month. Princeton has won four Ivy League championships in the last five years, including outright titles in 2002 and this year.
The other era of sustained success was in the early days of the program. Princeton won its first 14 varsity games in 1980, and Mooney's team went 13-4 in 1981 and advanced to the EAIAW regional championship. Princeton went 11-2-1 and won the school's first Ivy title in 1982, and no other Princeton team would win the league until Shackford took the Tigers to the 2000 championship. That 1982 team made the program's first NCAA tournament appearance, a 4-0 loss at North Carolina, and the Tigers then lost to Boston College in the first round of the 1983 NCAA tournament. Princeton would not return to the NCAA tournament until 1999.
The Princeton record book, at least until Negron came along, was dominated by the years 1980-85, and Prescott, Shaw and Mooney remain among the most accomplished players in program history, along with fellow Class of 1985 member Linda DeBoer. In the same game that she beat Mooney's season goals record, Negron also passed DeBoer's records for points in a career and points in a season and tied DeBoer's record for goals in a career with 41.
"We definitely didn't have the same access to the men's field," Mooney says. "Lourie-Love Field was the guys' field. We never played on that field. We had a great coach, though. We used to make fun of the field hockey players. They'd sit around talking, and Bob'd run our butts off. They'd be chatting about strategy; we'd be running. We were probably the best-conditioned team in the Ivy League. He was big on fundamentals. He'd been a men's coach and coached men's lacrosse. He treated us as serious athletes, and we had great results. He made us work; he didn't coddle us. We had good teams because of it."
Unfortunately for Mooney, the 1981 season would be her only full year of soccer at Princeton She was hurt prior to her sophomore year in a water skiing accident, and she then tore her ACL and medial collateral ligament in her knee upon returning. Sylvia Morelli suffered a similar injury her sophomore year yet returned to become a captain of this year's team. Mooney, though, was from a different era.
"I remember going to see the orthopedic surgeon," Mooney says. "He told me to stop playing. That was it. It broke my heart. That was the mentality then. You were just a girl, so who cared if you could play anymore. Now, women's athletes are taken so much more seriously. No one would tell Mia Hamm - or someone on at Princeton or any other school - that she couldn't play soccer anymore."
Mooney graduated in 1985 and then went to medical school at Pitt. Her two-year-old son John has a soccer ball of his own ("he prefers to throw it rather than kick it, but I'm working on that," she says), and she follows Princeton women's soccer very casually. She works in Lebanon, N.H., about 10 minutes from Dartmouth, and she will head to Hanover to check out Princeton teams in any number of sports when they're in town.
"I think it's exciting that they're doing so well," Mooney says. "I know of Julie, though I've never met her, and I know she played soccer and was a great player. She's got a great record. I'm assuming she makes her team run and work hard. You can't get anywhere without working hard."
As for losing her place in the record book after all these years, Mooney takes it in stride.
"I think it's great for her," Mooney says of Negron. "It's terrific. I didn't even know I had a record anyway."
She did, and she held it for 23 years.
Negron may have her record now, however, but Sue Mooney's place in Princeton women's soccer history and her role in helping make women's sports what they are today are secure forever.