Erasing Women’s Names at Brown University
Dear Brown Gymnastics and Brown University community,
What do you do when a legacy wall honoring everyone who has ever been a part of your program – created by the people in the program – is repainted overnight with no warning to the community? When the visual record of your history is erased?
In the winter of 2004, I was talking with Coach Jackie Court about the history of the Brown Gymnastics program. Coach Court was the first Head Coach of the program from 1973. She recruited me and encouraged me to stick with gymnastics at a time I was thinking about quitting. Before I stepped foot in the gym for my freshman year, she retired. I never had an opportunity to train with Coach Court, but I was forever grateful that she had gifted me the experience of closing out my gymnastics career at Brown.
We remained in touch over the years, and during the 2004 meet season, Coach Court and I discussed the history of Brown Gymnastics. Her face fell. There wasn’t a central place to find information about the program except in her own memories. There weren’t digital records of most of her years as a coach. She promised to bring me her box of Brown Gymnastics history.
At our final home meet of the year – an alumni meet – Coach Court handed me a small box filled with scrapbooks, greeting cards, the occasional meet program. There wasn’t much in it, she warned. The team had been cut in 1991 as a Varsity program, and they had fought back. Co-Captain Amy Cohen led the charge and was one of twelve plaintiffs in a Title IX lawsuit against the school. During that time and before the program was restored at a Varsity level, the University had gotten rid of most of the records of the team, so this box Coach Court handed me truly was the place to look for information.
I immediately dove in.
Some years had more information than others. Birthday cards signed by teammates, printed rosters. Most years of the 1970s were written as a date range with a frowny face to indicate that she didn’t have any information saved. I realized that by looking through the Head Coach’s box of memories, I still had no idea who had been on the Brown Gymnastics team. I made it my mission to find out.
For the next six months, I poured through Coach Court’s box. I made note of every name and nickname. I did Google searches for the gymnasts I could identify. I found emails – some that worked and some that didn’t. I found people on whitepages.com and made cold calls asking “Are you the one who was on the Brown Gymnastics team?” I began tracking information in a spreadsheet, finding out who had been on the team, when, and where they were from.
The alum were surprised to hear from me. Many of them were delighted to go into their attics or basements and pull out their own boxes of Brown Gymnastics memories. They thought back to their years on the team. They looked at notes written to them and tried to remember who they were from. They put me in contact with each other.
As the list of people who had been on the team started to become more complete, it only did so with the help of a whole community of alumnae. Women like Lisa Greenman (Kraner), Eugenia Shao (Steinberg), Esther Rolnick, Alice Huang, Adrienne Muller (Camesas), and Susan Brooks helped fill in the blanks of the 1970s. Mary Metayer (Raggenbass), Miranda Smith, Tracy Vietze, Debra Glazerman (Grossbaum), Nancy Lanzarone, Leslie Findlen, Ricki Grater, Karen DeLucia (Pinch), Kathleen Coskren (Parks), and Susan Craven (Williams) were key to answering questions about the 1980s. For the 1990s, Karen McDonald (Hurley), Eileen Rocchio (Sidwell), Jennifer Hsu, Lisa Stern (Kaplowitz), Lori Newkirk, Rachel Reichlin, Rebecca Casey, and Sydney Foster got the ball rolling. And going into the 2000s, women like Jeramy Bellwin (Savage), Caterina Schwiedenback, and Virginia Nuckols made sure I had the resources I needed. (Note: All names are as they were recorded in 2004). Along the way, I identified coaches, student assistants, and managers of the program, too.
We now had a hopefully complete roster of everyone who had been on the team, when, and where they were from. But what should we do with it?
Sara Carver-Milne was the Head Coach of the Brown Gymnastics team at this time. She had begun as an Assistant Coach my freshman year and became Head Coach of the program in 2002 (she remained at the helm until 2022). I shared my progress with her. In one conversation, we knew what needed to be done. There was a whole wall of the gym by the vault runway made of concrete blocks, covered in white paint. The wall was blank. We decided each person on the list would get a block of their own.
I bought a can of brown paint, a few paintbrushes, a level, a yardstick, a pencil, and a really good eraser, and I arrived on campus a few days early before my senior year. I planned to spend a few days in the gym writing names on the wall from morning until I couldn’t see straight anymore.
Over the course of a few days, I wrote over 150 names on the wall, up through the Class of 2004. I taped pieces of paper to the wall where the current team, coaches, and Coach Court’s blocks were meant to be so that they could paint them themselves.
On the first day of practice, the team showed up in the gym and gaped at the wall. Where it used to be blank, we now had our legacy. But where were their names? I told them the vision. Everyone would add their own names to the wall moving forward. When a gymnast started on the team, she would add her name, her starting year, and her hometown. When she finished her time on the team, she would add her final year.
The stress level went up in the room. To this point, 150 blocks of the wall were written fairly consistently in my handwriting. I could tell that some of my teammates were afraid to mess up their blocks. But, in the end, we all spent time painting our blocks together.
Since that time, the tradition has been not only maintained, but enhanced. Gymnasts have continued to add their names to the wall each year. Alum have visited the gym to initial their blocks. Graduating classes have taken photos in front of their names on the wall in their caps and gowns. Women have returned to the gym to take photos in front of the wall when they were pregnant or with their kids. People point to their names on the wall in their pictures.
Sara Carver-Milne once told me about a day when one of the team members was having a rough practice. She brought the gymnast to the wall and pointed out some of the names. “These gymnasts dealt with the same things you are dealing with. They got through it. You can, too.”
On September 11, the Brown gymnasts showed up in their gym and found that the wall was blank again. The names of everyone in our program – including their own names – had been erased. On a day that has become linked to the expression “Never Forget,” we were forgotten.
There was no warning. They just showed up to find that someone had seen fit to remove our legacy. All the people who had made their literal mark on the wall – it was all gone. Coach Court – who passed away in 2020 – had written on her own block, and that was now painted over like she had never been there.
The texts, calls, and direct messages have been flying in the Brown Gymnastics community in the days since. What did that wall mean to us? What did it mean to have our names erased? What did it mean that no one thought to contact any of us who contributed to that wall or whose names appeared on that wall before making such a permanent decision?
It has been years since I have stepped foot in the Brown Gymnastics gym. These last few days have been an education for me about how this wall evolved. People dropping all kinds of photos from all different phases of their lives – standing in front of the wall, pointing to their names, commemorating moments. Parents of our athletes and alum talking about how seeing the wall gave them comfort that their daughters would be respected and valued even after their time on the team was over. Gymnasts talking about how they saw the wall on their recruitment visit and imagined what it would be like to add their names. A parent who mentioned that her daughter had waited to put her final year on the wall. It reminded me of the loss of identity I experienced when my gymnastics career ended, and the idea that finally being able to paint her closing year on the wall would have been a symbol of closure for her.
Gymnasts have been able to see and connect to the hometowns written on the wall. Alum have gone back to campus for reunions with the intention of taking a picture in front of the wall. For all the gymnasts who have written on that wall with a paintbrush or a marker, it showed a beautiful collective tapestry of handwriting.
It cost $0 to keep the wall as it was. It cost money to erase these names.
There was a time when Sara Carver-Milne and I were the only two people on the planet who knew this wall was about to be filled with names. She has met or coached almost everyone whose names appeared on that wall. And in this time of loss and confusion for our community, she’s been the first person people are thinking to contact. Sara contacted me immediately. She’s been making calls. Getting answers.
The rumor is that the wall was painted over for a “new start.” With the lack of communication and the lack of a plan, the message is that the 200+ people who were part of this program before don’t matter.
Does Brown University want to be an institution that erases women’s names?
Regards,
Melissa Forziat
Gymnast, Class of ‘05
Sign the petition! Help the Brown Gymnastics community fight to choose how they restore their legacy. Your name matters. https://c.org/4N8tXyc2Jx
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