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| Talented Athlete, Devoted Fan |
"I haven't missed a basketball or football game since 1936, except for one on a snowy night this past year," says Marie Hays, a UNM alumna and longtime University donor. "When they built the new football stadium," she says, referring to University Stadium, completed in 1960, "I just moved to the same seat numbers I had in the old stadium."
Hays graduated from UNM with degrees in physical education and biology in 1936, and she talks fondly about the ways in which people looked out for one another during the Great Depression. "My mother was a wonderful cook," Hays recalls, "and so all of the football players would come over for lunches-that was in the hard times. My mother could stretch a pan of food for anywhere from three to 12 people or more; I never knew how many."
Other obstacles were less dire but still powerful: Hays experienced life as a woman athlete four decades before Title IX was enacted. Women had "played competitively in college for years," says Hays, "but in 1932, the year I came to college, it was decided that the girls shouldn't play anything other than intramural games. It was this thinking that we couldn't be both feminine and competitive in sports. We were awful mad about it."
But she didn't give up on athletics. "Team sports were really what I did well: basketball, volleyball, soccer, field hockey. And field hockey was a great sport-it was the meanest when the girls played-you put a hockey stick in some people's hands, and you'd better run if they didn't like you. But we had a lot of fun," says Hays. "That's how I lettered, in a combination of sports."
The University was a different place for athletes then than it is today. For instance, no golf course existed at that time. "It was all horny toads, skunks and mesa where the course is now," says Hays. Johnson Center hadn't been built. Students used Carlisle Gym, which had no cooling system. "What made this bad was that the human anatomy class housed their cadaver lab in one of Carlisle's rooms," she says, recalling the odor wafting into the hallway. "Everything was held there in Carlisle: our concerts, our dances and our games, all next to the cadavers."
Hays speaks fondly of her personal connection to Roy Johnson, the man after whom Johnson Center is named. "Roy always wanted the girls to have opportunities, and he would run the boys out of the gym so that we could practice for a while. He was the most wonderful man I think I ever knew."
In addition to the completion of Johnson Center in 1957, other aspects of athletics at UNM have changed as well. "I went to see the women play basketball when they wouldn't have 20 people in the crowd," remembers Hays. "Now there are as many fans as with the men." About these changes, Hays says, "I think it's wonderful in women's athletics today, and they're still the best activities going."
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