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Book Excerpt - The First 50 Years Of Women's Athletics: Cathy Corcione
November 19, 2020 | Women's Swimming and Diving
As part of the celebration of the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton, goprincetontigers.com/50Years will be featuring excerpts on the third Thursday of each month from the book that Department of Athletics historian Jerry Price is writing about the evolution of the program from 1970 through 2020. Here is the second of those excerpts, featuring Olympic swimmer and five-time national collegiate champion Cathy Corcione ’74.
The book will be available in the spring of 2021.
Cathy Corcione is walking slowly on the boardwalk in Long Branch.
It is very warm for early November, the temperature in the low 70s, no breeze off the Atlantic Ocean, which is on her left as she strolls south. Her youngest daughter is getting married in two days, and she has been working through small details in the last few minutes. The photographer might not be able to get there. Eh, she decides, it’s not a big deal. Just use someone’s phone if it comes to that.
Her phone rings, and she apologizes as she answers, what with the wedding and all. It’s her 85-year-old aunt. Aunt Joyce. She needs to make sure she’s okay.
“Nobody there,” she says with a laugh. “Must have accidentally dialed me.”
It’s a 2020 wedding, to be sure. The bride and groom were supposed to be married in July, but that had to be put on hold. And the photographer who might not be able to make it? She’s coming from Massachusetts, where there are COVID restrictions in place.
Still, she seems unfazed by it all. In fact, Cathy Corcione seems very, very difficult to faze.
“My first thought when something goes wrong is always, ‘how are we going to fix this?’” she says.
Corcione calls herself an introvert and speaks about mindfulness and being in the moment. As she walks along the boardwalk in the rebuilt Jersey Shore town, though, she disappears from this moment and heads back to another, quickly going from 2020 back to the mid-1950s.
“This is my hometown,” she says.
She points to her right, over to a series of trendy shops and restaurants.
“That’s where my first beach club was.”
THE beach club? The one where, when she was a six year old, she cried because you had to be seven to be on the swim team and her best friend, who was already seven, could join but she couldn’t? The one where the coach finally gave in, let her swim against a 13 year old and in the process accidentally discovered one of the great prodigies American swimming has ever seen, a prodigy who just nine years later, at the age of 15, would find herself on the U.S. Olympic team in Mexico City?
“No,” she says. “Not that one. That was my second one. This was my first one.”
She stops in her tracks.
“There was a tunnel that ran from the club under Ocean Avenue and took you to the beach. I was maybe 2 or 3 when my father’s friend – Monk was his name – scooped me up like a football and ran with me under his arm right into the ocean. Then we went through was what I thought was a very big wave. I didn’t realize that I was going to come out the other side of it. I thought I was dead under there. He did it again the next day. After a few times, I went to him to get him to do it again.”
She is smiling as she transforms herself back from her childhood and into the present.
“And that,” she says, “was my introduction to water.”
It’s been a lifetime relationship. She still coaches the sport, in her fourth decade of doing so at the Central Jersey Aquatic Club, where her charges run from the age of six to 21. For that matter, she still swims herself.
She has had an extraordinary life. Where do you even start to tell about it, other than, obviously, in Long Branch?
Is it with the Olympics? She was, after all, the first Princeton woman Olympian, though she was still a girl at the time and it was before women were admitted to Princeton.
Of maybe it’s with her time at Princeton? She was a multiple-time national champion as part of Princeton’s first women’s swimming and diving team, a group of six women who finished third at the national championships in 1973.
She’s an artist, a painter specifically. Start there? She has her favorite pieces on her phone. Many have a swimming theme. Which is her favorite? The one that she did from a picture of a swim team on the deck? Or of a false start in a race? No, it’s actually one that she did from an old family photo she found, of a distant cousin on her wedding day, in her wedding gown and makeup, seated, with a cigarette in her hand.
“I was going to name that painting ‘The Cinderella Bride,’” she says. “She looked like Cinderella with a cigarette in her hand. The dichotomy struck me.”
Or maybe it’s one of the first words she ever learned.
There’s a noticeable calmness about her, and the more she speaks, the more it’s clear she has a great sense of herself, of who she is. There’s an irony to that, given the word that is such a good place to begin.
“As soon as I could pronounce the word, my parents made me say it,” she says. “Adopted.”
And so she grew up in an Italian family at the Jersey Shore. A very large Italian family. Her father was the youngest of 10 children, and his parents didn’t speak English. She grew up with a brother, also adopted. She would “adopt” many of the traditional Italian traits – the expressions, the mannerisms.
It would be until she was in her 30s when she would look for, and find, her birth mother. As it turned out, she had two biological sisters and a biological brother. She would have been the oldest of the group.
Recently, she also discovered her biological father and his family, where she has two more biological sisters and another biological brother. There were athletes up and down on both sides of her biological families.
As a kid in Long Branch, her father, Fred Corcione, loved that she was a bit of a tomboy. He had been a high school football player himself, and he taught her to punt, pass and kick, hoping she’d turn out to be a female Paul Hornung. He also taught her golf, bowling and baseball, which she’d play with her friends in the yard.
In none of those families, biological or adopted, were there any swimmers, at least that she ever heard about.
“There were no organized sports for girls then,” she says. “When I was a kid, everyone went to the beach though. If you didn’t know how to swim, you couldn’t play with anyone. We were always in the ocean or in the pool.”
There were beach clubs all up and down the Shore in Monmouth County, and these clubs also had swim teams. She wanted to join one in the West End section of Long Branch with her best friend, but there was the catch that you had to be seven, like the friend, and she was still six.
“My mother begged and pleaded to the coach to take me,” she says. “He decided that he’d see how I did against one of his older swimmers, who was 13. I beat her, and he let me on the team.”
After that first summer season, the coaches then told her parents about her potential. The next step was a year-round program, at the Asbury Park YMCA. When she first walked in, the coach sent her to the diving board with the divers, until she said she was a swimmer.
And she wasn’t just any swimmer. By the next year, just one year after she started, she finished second in the 50 free in her age group at the New Jersey Junior Olympics. By the time she was 12, she had set the national record for her age in the 100 free. Her first senior nationals was the next year in the Oklahoma town of Bartlesville, where at the age of 13 she finished eighth in 100 free.
She started at Long Branch High School in 1966, where there still were no varsity sports for girls. Within two more years, she would be a part of the U.S. women’s swim team at the Mexico City Olympic Games.
“Swimming in the Olympic Trials was most nerve-wracking experience of life,” she says. “It was the first time I realized that nobody could do this for me. Nobody could help me. I remember not sleeping very much because I was so nervous the whole time. I was focused, but nervous. I really wanted to do it. I don’t like to lose.”
She came in fifth in the 200 IM – with a time that was also fifth in the world that year – and 100 free, which earned a spot on the team.
“There were a few other 15 year olds there,” she says. “One of them is still my best friend, Diane Giebel. I remember we had more freedom than I thought a 15 year old should have. We took a subway into the middle of Mexico City to watch the bullfights. Hey, nobody told us we couldn’t.”
This was not just an Olympic Games. This was the 1968 Games, the ones that happened after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the ones during the Vietnam War, the one where Tommie Smith and John Carlos offered the Black Power salute after they came in first and third in the 200-meter dash.
“The Soviet Union had just invaded Czechoslovakia,” she says. “They had to rearrange the dining halls, because they had been eating together. There was just a lot of tension. We were literally behind barbed wire in the Village. There were curfews. We had guards. Female guards. I remember the last night, before we were leaving, we all ran up to the roof because someone said there would be a wedding going through the streets. There was a wedding procession that came by, between two athletes who had won medals [the famous wedding between Czech gymnast Vera Caslawska and Mexican runner Josef Odlozil]. We just watched it. And then there was chaos. Some students broke into the village, and the next day someone got us and we left.”
If her experience in Mexico City wasn’t eye-opening enough, she found it was a different culture when she came back to Long Branch.
“The world was a completely different place,” she says. “When we left, there was a low hum of discontent. You still had the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons. Girls were still wearing knee socks and plaid skirts. When we came back, completely different world. There was different music. Different clothing. It was much edgier."
She took a year off from swimming after the 1968 Games. When it came time to choose a college, a family friend suggested applying to Princeton, which was now taking women. She was accepted, and she entered in the fall of 1970, going from co-ed public high school to a private university that had been all-male until the year before she arrived.
There was no varsity swim team for women in the 1970-71 academic year, which was fine with her. Two others, swimmer Jane Fremon and diver Cece Herron, trained with the men and then competed at the women’s Eastern championships, finishing fifth as a team with just the two of them. That was nothing compared to the next year.
She returned to the pool in the summer after her freshman year, with a club team that needed someone to do the 100 free on a relay at nationals. When she got back to Princeton, there were now five other women in addition to her who formed the first varsity women’s swim team.
“We sent Carol Brown to speak for us,” she says laughing. “She got Merrily Dean [Baker, the women’s athletic administrator] to speak for us. Merrily jumped all over it. We were allowed to train with the men. We had some meets. She had to be our chaperone who took us on the road. It was great. She was so good to us.”
Corcione swam at the 1972 Olympic Trials and finished sixth in the 100 free, missing out on a trip to Munich. She calls the final at the ’72 Trials “the best of my life,” after she had been seeded near the bottom of the 70 swimmers heading in.
The following year, at the AIAW national championships in Moscow, Idaho, Princeton’s first group of women finished in third place as a team. Corcione won the 100 free and 100 fly in national records, and she, Brown, Fremon and Barb Franks won the 200 freestyle relay, in an American record no less.
Her wins there qualified her for the World University Games, which were held in a different Moscow, the more famous one. She was the anchor of the winning 400 free relay, and she finished second in the 100 fly.
“That was such an interesting trip,” she says. “This was during the Cold War, and we literally had to show a visa to a stone-faced soldier to go from our room to the dining hall. We swam outside, and it was freezing. But it was also college kids from all around the word. It was so much fun.”
She had one more year of college swimming after that, and she won the 100 IM and the 200 IM, giving her four individual national championships. She also knew that was the end of competitive swimming for her.
“Honestly, she says, “I got to the point where I wasn’t nervous on the starting block. If you see pictures of me, you’ll see everyone smiling at the camera and I’m stone-faced. I was completely focused. Always hyper-nervous. I always had a lot of adrenaline. I got to the point where I was calm on the starting block. I didn’t have the fire that I needed to compete, and that meant I was done. It happened at the right time. It happened at the end of my senior year of college.”
She was just starting down a new path though. She majored in art history, and then after raising the three children she had when she was young, she began painting. Now her art is represented by three different New Jersey galleries, as well has her coaching job.
She and Dan, her partner of 23 years, have put together an extended family of seven children and nine grandchildren between them. Dan is, in contrast to her, an extrovert. He asked her how many people she saw that she knew during her short walk around the waterfront, and she said none. He countered by pointing out that he would have seen a bunch had he been there. It’s the youngest of the children, age 35, who was married two days after that warm, reflective November day in Long Branch.
And that takes her back to that word she learned all those years ago in this town.
“One of the things about being adopted that people overlook is that you spend your life not resembling anyone,” she says. “When you have a biological family, you take that for granted. Someone has a baby, and they say ‘oh, she looks like Aunt Sue or he looks just like her brother.’ When you’re adopted, that doesn’t happen to you, so when you do meet your biological family, you get a new perspective on your appearance. My father was okay when I said I wanted to meet them. My mother was quite sensitive about it. The emotions in these types of situations run the gamut. I can’t even tell you how complex people’s emotions are about this. I was one of the lucky ones. I was embraced 100 percent when I found both of my birth families.”
And what did she tell them? She laughs again.
“I told them I grew up on the Jersey Shore and become a swimmer,” she says. “In fact, I became an Olympic swimmer. And I told them I was lucky enough to be one of the first women ever to be able to swim at Princeton.”
