The Originals

ALL STORIES HAVE a beginning, even stories that have gone untold.

We know about Julie Foudy, Catarina Macario, Kelley O’Hara, Christen Press … Some of the country’s greatest women’s soccer players have come through the Stanford portal.

But what of Allison Brown, Ellen Griep, Kathy Kelley? They surely are just as important for what they did to create that path.

A commonality among women’s sports, including those at Stanford, is that nearly each one was created with a fight. Struggles for equality, recognition, and respect. And from those fights, good things happened – championships, All-Americans, glory. But who remembers the fighters?  

The Stanford women’s soccer team has won three national championships, reached five NCAA finals, advanced to 10 College Cup final fours, crowned five different Hermann Trophy winners, and helped 10 players reach the World Cup.

All of it can be traced to one person.

ALLISON BROWN ’77 was in the Stanford band. She first played clarinet and for a while the tuba, ‘scattering” through halftime shows, as the band did, and painted “Boobs on Toobs” on her tuba bell.

“I’ve always been a very strong feminist,” she said from Berlin, her home since being granted a Fulbright Scholarship in 1982. “Reducing women to a body part is not something I would normally do, but that fit. It drew attention to women being out there, in a way that the Stanford band could relate to. I felt like it was OK.”

Brown started out majoring in chemistry because she felt it was important for women to be involved in contraception research. Eventually, she grew weary of chemistry and sat for a heart to heart with one of her professors, Carl Djerassi, the father of the birth control pill.

“It’s true, there have to be more women doing this,” Djerassi told her. “But it makes more sense to have women doing it who want to be there.”

Brown switched to German Studies, leading to a career as a translator of books and museum exhibitions in Germany. In the life she’s made there, she plays the clarinet in Berlin’s women’s concert band, organized a soccer team that won a Gay Games gold medal, and likes to run half-marathons, eager to attempt another for the first time since enduring a heart attack in 2019.

Brown arrived at Stanford in 1973 from Dix Hills, Long Island. Though a fan of the boys’ team at Half Hollow Hills High School, she never played soccer herself. She played fifth singles badminton; but “I wasn’t very good,” she said. “I was more in charge of the tea for the break.”

Allison’s mother, Tibby, was a civil service worker in family court and fought for equal pay in the courtroom. Barbara preceded sister Allison at Stanford and was active in the Women’s Center, a resource center, and in 1974 helped create a “Guide for Stanford Women,” a 40-page pamphlet with health, legal, and safety advice: “You’ve seen your advisor six times and he still doesn’t know your name … you’re three weeks late … you want to play lacrosse but there’s no women’s team … your bike has a flat tire … you need a job but the ads say ‘male preferred.’”

“She was the feminist before me,” Allison said.

To Allison, athletic ability wasn’t a prerequisite for her involvement in sports. When the boys of Branner Hall played pickup soccer in front of the dorm, Brown joined in. When Branner formed an intramural soccer team, Brown joined that too. Being the only female in the entire league wasn’t scary, it was perplexing.

“I thought, It would be more fun to play with women,” Brown recalled. “Why isn’t there a women’s team?”

Brown made a decision. Before she left Stanford, there would be a women’s soccer program and she was going to have something to do with it. Her superpower, after all, was persistence. That’s when the sophomore started hanging up flyers “on every women’s bathroom door on campus.”

Those who responded to a women's intramural team were a collection of undergrads, graduates, staff members, and student wives. Some, or perhaps most, didn’t even know the rules. Yet, come January, they would play full-field seven-a-side soccer against men.

Brown set up daily one-hour practice sessions. Sometimes, no one else showed, leaving Allison alone with a ball and her thoughts. Sometimes, it was just Brown and Eila Skinner, a junior, kicking a ball back and forth, or chasing it when they tried to shoot against each other without any actual goals.

“I can’t even believe it now that I think about it,” said Skinner, now chair of Stanford’s Department of Urology. “We were not very good. Oh man, they killed us. You definitely knew the intramural thing playing against the guys was not going to be a very good answer.”

Skinner was an exception to the lack-of-experience rule. She played on a girls’ team at her boarding school, Emma Willard in upstate New York, and as a freshman was “shocked” to learn Stanford didn’t have a women’s soccer team.

The team dubbed “Women’s Center,” though it had no connection with the center, opened with a 3-0 loss to the El Tigre eating club. The Stanford Daily enjoyed the novelty, and writer Pete Bhatia provided a lighthearted description of women playing in a men’s league that was viewed as condescending and sexist.

Brown responded quickly, calling Bhatia out in a lengthy letter to the editor signed by the entire team. Bhatia, later a 10-time Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper editor, claimed Brown couldn’t take a joke. The team didn’t score all season and lost every match. But that wasn’t the point. It proved women were interested in playing soccer (and, in fact, there were many men’s teams that lost by more outrageous scores). 

Brown knew they were on to something and talked Stanford men’s soccer coach Fred Priddle into teaching a beginning class for women. In the fall of 1975, Priddle saw enough promise to relay a message – Cal had challenged Stanford to a match.

With days to assemble a team, Brown checked old phone lists, made calls, and distributed even more leaflets. She found Maria Duryea playing pickup soccer with foreign professors at lunch time. Julie Zender and Lorraine Davis responded to an ad in the Daily. Others were plucked from P.E. classes because they looked “athletic.”

However, the biggest additions were Ellen Griep and Kathy Kelley, freshmen on the men’s freshmen team. With those two, Stanford women’s soccer was on its way.

Allison Brown '77

GRIEP AND KELLEY didn’t know each other, but rather tried out and made the men’s team independently.

Kelley didn’t have the comprehensive athletic background of Griep. She did play on the Punahou School boys’ soccer team in Hawaii her senior year, changing her reversible mesh jersey behind coconut trees. Otherwise, her passion was surfing.

Growing up in Honolulu near the beach below Diamond Head, Kelley was Hawaii through and through – perpetually tanned and wearing flip flops and shorts in the Palo Alto sunshine.

When Kathy was 15, a friend’s sister was playing in an adult women’s soccer league. The friend wanted to play and asked Kathy if she would join her.

“C’mon, you’ll have fun,” the friend said.

“She dragged me out to practice and my world changed forever,” Carey said.

She’s not kidding. Fifty years later, she’s still playing. Carey has traveled around the country and the world, winning 14 national championships in her age groups and several international masters titles.

Upon returning to Hawaii after graduation, Punahou begged Kathy to coach its new JV girls’ team. Several refusals later and with practice to begin the next day, Carey reluctantly accepted, beginning a 30-year coaching career that included high schools, clubs, the Olympic Development Program, and more than 20 years with the University of Hawai’i women’s team.

To illustrate how far-reaching soccer became in her life, Kathy met her husband, David Carey, on the soccer field. He played for the Stanford men’s team.

“More important than the championships are the wonderful friends that soccer has brought me,” she said. “They are priceless.”

THE CAL SHOWDOWN was scheduled for the morning of the 1975 Big Game, on November 22 at 9 a.m. on Stanford’s Harry Maloney Field.

Uniforms … There’s some debate. Carey recalls that the players wore “standard bookstore T-shirts.” Skinner recalls buying unadorned red T-shirts. In the lone surviving photograph of that game, Kathy Kelley is wearing a bookstore-esque football-style shirt with “Stanford” curved over a block number with stripes on the sleeves.

The team had one practice and it wasn’t a particularly good one before the historic first game. It didn’t matter – Stanford clocked the Bears, 4-2.

There was no question this was the start of something, but what? Brown wanted the program to discourage the extreme competitiveness of the men’s game and be a place where even inexperienced players could feel comfortable and accepted as long as they played hard.

She also knew that the team needed a coach. As much as she wanted a woman, at the time there really wasn’t anyone qualified. Instead, Brown turned to a graduating senior on the men’s team, Phil Wright.

“If I can find enough people interested in keeping this going, would you be the coach?” she asked.

Wright didn’t need to think twice. The son of a Stanford French history professor, Wright grew up on campus, learned the game in France when his father was the cultural attachè at the U.S. embassy, and was an all-conference player at Stanford with friends on the women’s team.

Wright was laid back and usually accompanied by Bessie, his black lab/shepherd/husky mix. Wright often coached shirtless or barefoot, and was not immune to a postgame beer. He hosted team strawberry daiquiri parties and invited his players to watch “Soccer Made in Germany” on PBS.

But Wright, competitive as they come, took the role seriously. He earned a U.S. Soccer Federation coaching license, solicited coaching help from his teammates, and refused to be paid, though he jokingly accepted a “salary” of $1.

“I tried to make sure that we created a really positive environment, so that athletes who hadn’t played soccer would still be comfortable and not be intimidated,” he said. “And we had a lot of them.”

LONG BEFORE THE Internet, cell phones, and home computers, Wright tried to find games. He called competitors at other schools and scrolled through phone books. By word of mouth, Wright was able to find women’s teams willing to play Stanford.

In winter and spring of 1975-76, Wright found a combination of adult clubs, schools, an indoor tournament, and even a boys under-18 team, to fill out the schedule.

“I was in a situation where I had to create everything,” said Wright, a retired attorney and local government official who had a side career as coach and administrator in the soccer world. “I had to find other teams. I had to try to put together a schedule and find referees, who occasionally was me. I did an awful lot of stuff, but it just seemed like the right thing to do, so the women could have an actual season and play the game that I had played and loved for many years.”

Wright convinced Priddle to surrender some old men’s jerseys and washed them himself, sometimes with help from his mother, after every match. Before a road contest in Davis, Wright washed the uniforms, but didn’t have time to dry them. The players did the rest by gripping the wet jerseys as they flapped outside the open car windows on the long drive.

As the years went along, more women came out for the team – 94 by the fall of 1977. The talent improved as the game grew nationwide with the increasing visibility of Pelè and the North American Soccer League, the growth of girls’ youth leagues, and as Title IX, the education discrimination legislation signed in 1972, kicked in.

Stanford played in the San Jose Women’s League in the fall and the new Northern California Collegiate Women’s Soccer Conference in the spring, going 14-2 that first academic year of 1975-76.

Cindy Shorney came from a soccer background in Wheaton, Illinois, to make an immediate impact at center half as a freshman in 1976-77, the team’s first season with official ‘club’ status.

The team gathered momentum, and crowds at Roble and Harry Maloney fields grew. Wright, who still played semipro in San Francisco on Sundays and in pickup games with international students on weekdays, invited anyone he knew from the soccer community to come watch. With an entertaining high-scoring style of play, the women kept them coming back.

In the spring of 1978, the first AIAW national collegiate championship tournament was three years away, the first NCAA tournament four years off, and North Carolina had not yet become women’s soccer’s first dominant program. But 1978 represented the first stab at a national postseason women’s tournament, in the form of the Colorado College Invitational in Colorado Springs.

Still with no support from athletics, 13 Stanford players each spent $300 of their own money to travel to a nine-team event that featured Northern Colorado, regarded as the best in the country.  

In a hectic two-day tournament that was played through sun and rain, Stanford forced a matchup with Northern Colorado in the semifinals. Stanford countered a tying own goal with a late penalty-kick winner by freshman Kris McGarrey, who followed with a tying goal in the final against Texas later that day in the cold and mud.

With three minutes remaining in the first overtime period, Griep pounded home a goal to give Stanford a 2-1 victory over the Longhorns and perhaps even a claim at a national championship.

A year later, Nancy Geisse arrived with 10 years of playing experience, first in the soccer hotbed of St. Louis and then on a high school boys’ team in Indianapolis. Geisse found a kinship with the senior Griep as elite-level players with similar attitudes toward the game.

“I wanted it to be a serious program,” Geisse said. “And sometimes I was vocal about that.”

With the two up front and Shorney causing havoc, Stanford had perhaps its best season yet, going 21-1 in 1978-79 to close out its first four-year stretch at 65-8-2 with three conference championships.

The program was having great success, but with the success came frustration from the athletic department’s unwillingness to recognize that success and bless women’s soccer as a varsity sport.

At one point Kelley and Geisse walked into athletic director Andy Geiger’s office unannounced. Kelley dropped an armful of trophies on his desk and told him, essentially, We’re doing our part. When are you going to do yours?

While other women’s club programs were being raised to varsity status, soccer was left behind. Men’s soccer even was demoted to “varsity club” status, apparently to keep things even by preventing the additional expense of adding women’s soccer as a Title IX consequence.

Geisse had further one-on-one discussions with Geiger without progress. But the administration gave the program hope by offering a deal. If the assistant men’s coach also coached the women’s program, varsity status could be achieved because a staff member would be in charge at no additional cost.

Painfully, the team agreed to let Wright go, but the athletics department did not follow through. The new coach was not a good fit and off-the-field issues arose, which may have delayed the ascent to varsity for several more years. It wasn’t until 1984 that Stanford finally played its first official varsity contest.

ON JANUARY 7, 1982, Kathy Kelley Carey received a call from Seattle. Ellen Griep died in her sleep at age 24.

A third-year student at University of Washington’s School of Medicine, Griep didn’t show up for her shift that morning at the Pacific Medical Center. Thinking she overslept, though out of character for Ellen, staff went to her quarters on the same hospital grounds where she grew up and found her.

Fatal cardiac arrest, caused by a congenital defect that had gone undetected. Given a couple more years, the defect undoubtedly would have been discovered and treated and she would have been fine.

“It was stunning,” Carey said. “Just shocking.”

Griep had still been an active player and a member of two Seattle-area squads to win the U.S. National Challenge Cup – the highest level for women’s soccer at the time. The coach was Mike Ryan, who would become the first U.S. women’s national team coach two years later.

It’s not hard to imagine that the first official international match played by the U.S. women’s national team, against host Italy on Aug. 18, 1985, could have included two Stanford players -- Griep and Geisse. Geisse was on that team, but underwent what turned out to be unnecessary abdominal surgery that summer and was sidelined for weeks because of complications, missing the trip. She never heard from the national team again.

For years, Griep was remembered at the Investiture of the Doctoral Hoods and Oath Ceremony at UW’s School of Medicine, when a student was honored with the Ellen Griep Award for providing inspiration to his or her peers, staff, and faculty by managing the academic demands of medical school and maintaining excellence in other endeavors in life.

And inside the Pacific Tower, is the Ellen Griep Memorial Library.

“Ellen’s still one of the most wonderful and impressive people I’ve had the honor to know,” her brother, Jon, said.