Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | summer 2008

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FIRST, FEMALE, AND FEARLESS
2008 HALL OF FAME INDUCTEE CATHY CARROLL OERTER IS A PIONEER IN ATHLETICS, ART, LIFE

Cathy Carroll Oerter knows her purpose in life: If something needs to be done, she does it.

It started at age 18, when the high school standout from Collins, Iowa, didn’t let the fact that her chosen college had no women’s track program keep her from her dream of running collegiate track.

“I’m straight off the farm and I have these horrible glasses,” she says of that summer day in 1970, “these bad, ugly, plastic glasses, and I remember my mother and I walking into Jerry Barland’s office.”

Oerter’s conversation with Barland, then the Iowa State men’s track and field coach, proved fruitful. It put the wheels in motion to begin a women’s track club at ISU, with the university’s blessing: Oerter would just have to recruit all the athletes, find a coach, and do all the administrative work herself.

It was a lot, but it was what a female athlete had to do to achieve her dreams in the years before Title IX.

Barland’s wife sewed Oerter’s first uniform. (“I still have it,” she says.) And when Oerter placed an advertisement seeking teammates in the Iowa State Daily, ISU Hall-of-Famer Peg Neppel was the first to answer the call. Oerter also met with Chris Murray, a former ISU men’s assistant coach who would go on to become ISU’s Hall-of-Fame women’s head coach, and convinced him to help out.

“She was very persuasive,” Murray remembers. “I guess you could say I’m one of her first recruits.”

The team trained in State Gym on a small track with tight corners. “I can remember doing sprints,” Oerter says, “and they had a big pad on the far wall. You’d be doing 40-yard sprints and you would run out of room, so you’d just sort of bounce off the pad. We’d just keep getting up and going back and doing it again.”
Oerter’s teammates were constantly asked to make sacrifices (“I always laugh and say that instead of having furniture, clothes, or a car, all my money went into paying for track meets,” Oerter says), but love for the sport and passion for the team carried them through.

“No one was out for her own agenda,” she says. “We were building a team.”

In a few short years, the team had developed into a force. Oerter won the 100 meters and long jump titles en route to the Cyclones’ victory at the inaugural Big Eight outdoor championship in 1974, setting the stage for an appearance in the 1974 AIAW national championships. Oerter’s third-place finish in the long jump and sixth-place finish in the 100 meters made her Iowa State’s first female All-American, but the best was still to come. After a teammate was sidelined by injury, Oerter volunteered to substitute on ISU’s mile relay team.

“Sprinters do not like quarter-milers,” she says. “I wasn’t going in singing a song because I knew how much work it was going to be and how much it was going to hurt. So I get on the track, and in the lane next to me is the American record-holder in the 400 meters and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, boy.’”

After the race, Oerter says her rear end hurt so bad she “couldn’t even sit down,” but it didn’t matter, because the team was on its feet. ISU won the mile relay with a new championship record time, marking the school’s first national title and propelling the Cyclones to a fifth-place national finish at their first national championships.

In the years that followed, the Iowa State women won every Big Eight cross country and track team title for the remainder of the 1970s, as well as five national championships in cross country and indoor track.

“It’s a bit of a fairy tale,” Murray says. “Cathy was a true pioneer.”

While Oerter somewhat dismisses the pioneer label by noting that someone else would have come along and started the program if she hadn’t, she also cknowledges that throughout life she has tended to be “a few steps ahead.”

She describes her late husband Al Oerter, a four-time Olympic gold medalist who died last year at age 71, as having the same pioneering traits. The two shared a love for athletics, as well as Cathy’s love for art (a former high school art teacher, she earned her 1974 ISU degree in applied art), which later became a passion of Al’s. Today, Cathy directs the program “Art of the Olympians,” a showcase of artwork by her husband and other Olympic athletes that is touring the globe and exhibiting in Beijing during the 2008 Games.

“I think these people in their souls are creative people,” Oerter says of the connection between art and Olympic sport. “They need to figure out a way to be the best they can in their sports, and it’s a means of expression. They also travel the world, and art is such a huge part of life in any city that I think you just sort of absorb that.”

Oerter, who lives in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., is also a pioneer in the discipline of natural movement dance, a fluid movement done to classical music that Oerter says has “touched her heart.” Today she says she is happy and healthy and continues to find new ways to express herself as an artist and an athlete, honoring the husband who enriched her life and celebrating the spirit of a college freshman with a dream.

“I was this farm girl just walking into Jerry Barland’s office with no fear, and I’ve carried that with me through my entire life,” Oerter says. “There was no fear. If I could encourage anybody, I’d tell them to just go for it. You should never have any fears.”

Cathy Carroll Oerter is one of nine inductees into the 2008 Iowa State University Athletics Hall of Fame who will be honored Sept. 5-6 in Ames.

2008 ISU Athletics Hall of Fame Inductees

Steve Carson, Track & Field
Three-time All-American, two-time Big Eight champ, and 1967 national champion in the 600-yard dash

Robert Hess, Wrestling
ISU’s first two-time national champion (1932, 1933), wrestling in the 175-pound class despite never
weighing more than 168 pounds

Elaine Hieber, Administration
Retired senior associate athletics director who was named 2001 women’s collegiate athletics administrator of the year

Bob Locker, Baseball
All-Big Eight pitcher who is the only Cyclone ever to appear in a World Series (1972, Oakland A’s)

Al Nacin, Wrestling
ISU’s first four-time All-American and 1975 190-pound national champion

Cathy Carroll Oerter, Track & Field
Considered the mother of the ISU women’s track and field program; member of the mile relay team that won ISU’s first national title in women’s track in 1974

Frank Randall, Athletics Training
ISU staffer from 1970-2008 and member of National Athletics Trainers Association Hall of Fame

Marcus Robertson, Football
Three-time All-Big Eight cornerback who has been an NFL standout since 1991

Otto Stowe, Football
All-Big Eight wide receiver who was a two-time Super Bowl participant and member of the legendary 1972 Miami Dolphins

About the Writer | Kate Bruns is the associate editor of VISIONS magazine.