LABOR OF LOVE: Jerry Price proudly displays his book, “I Can Do Anything,” chronicling the first 50 years of women’s athletics at Princeton University, which came out on December 1. Price, who has been with Princeton University’s Office of Athletic Communications since 1989, spent 14 months and conducted nearly 100 interviews in writing the book. The 500-page opus is crammed with stories of the inspiring athletes who made Tiger women’s sports a powerhouse. (Photo provided by Jerry Price)
By Bill Alden
In a departure from his day job working in Princeton University’s Office of Athletic Communications, Jerry Price penned a romantic novel, With You, that came out in 2020.
In writing the well-received book, Price learned an important lesson about crafting fiction
“Somebody asked me the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and I said non-fiction is a lot harder because you can’t just make it all up,” said Price, who has been working in Princeton athletics since 1989 and was a sportswriter for the Trenton Times before that.
Now, Price has authored a second book, I Can Do Anything, chronicling the first 50 years of women’s athletics at Princeton that is crammed with stories that seem to be made up because of the improbable journey to success of the inspiring athletes profiled.
Starting with a pair of Princeton coeds entering the Eastern Intercollegiate tennis tournament as last-minute entrants in 1970, Tiger women athletes have gone on to achieve an astonishing array of accomplishments, including a slew of All-American honors, numerous Ivy League and NCAA individual and team titles, and Olympic gold medals, among many others.
The book, which came out on December 1, is 500 pages long and features eight sections — The Pioneers, Administration and Coaches, A New Era, Three-Sport
Athletes, Olympians, National Champions, Professional Athletes, Service, and Sport by Sport Reviews, along with hundreds of photos. It can be purchased online at prismcolorcorp.com/princetonsports.
When Price took on project at the request of then-Princeton Director of Athletics Mollie Marcoux-Samaan, he didn’t want the book to be an encyclopedia of women’s athletics. Rather, he wanted to tell the stories of how Princeton went from a school that didn’t have any women students for its first 223 years to becoming a women’s athletics powerhouse.
“This was a chance to do something that would linger and that people would be able to have something of a historic record,” said Price, who is currently the Department of Athletics historian. “I was really excited about it.”
In tracing the history of women’s sports at Princeton, Price started at the beginning by interviewing Merrily Dean Baker, who came to the school 1970 as the first female athletic administrator. She was tasked with implementing a five-year plan to build a women’s athletic program but sped things up when the two tennis players came to her looking to compete that fall.
“The last I knew about Merrily was that she was the athletic director at Michigan State,” said Price.
“I really wanted to go there in person and do this right. It was January and I am going to have to go out to East
Lansing, Mich. Nobody had her contact information and I was finally able to get it through somebody who worked at Michigan State. It turned out that she is retired and moved to South Florida. Instead of going to East Lansing, I went to Boynton Beach, Fla., for five days in January 2020. Merrily talked about how the success of women’s athletics helped coeducation. That is 100 percent true, it gave them instant credibility.”
After that auspicious start, Price ran into a major obstacle.
“The next thing that happened is that the pandemic started, so I really wasn’t able to do any more in-person interviews,” said Price, who interviewed nearly 100 people for the book which took him 14 months to complete.
“Everything else I did through Zoom, which was good and bad. Zoom is not as good as being there in person. When you actually see the person, you can see facially how they are responding and get a better sense of who they are. Zoom is not as good as if you were actually sitting there with them.”
Doing the interviews via Zoom didn’t prevent Price from drawing out the backstory from athletes who were humble about their trials and triumphs.
“Everybody had something interesting to say,” said Price. “They all started out by saying the same thing, it didn’t matter who they were — there is nothing really special about me, no matter how accomplished they are.”
A desire to simply compete emerged as a common theme from Price’s conversations.
“What really stands out to me is that for all of the pioneering women and it is true of the current generation is the idea and you can sum the whole book up by saying we just wanted to play sports,” said Price.
“That was motivation, it wasn’t anything beyond that they wanted to compete, they wanted to be serious athletes. That is the commonality from everybody, just how they love the idea of having their experience at Princeton as athletes.”
The lessons gained from being a Princeton athlete stayed with them no matter what path they took after graduation.
“You go to Princeton for four years and it changes you for 40 years after that,” said Price.
“They all came back to the same thing. They all said, pretty much to a person, that I was shaped by my experience of competing at Princeton.”
Two of those athletes, Helena Novakova, one of the two tennis players who first competed for Princeton, and NCAA champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist rower Caroline Lind, relished the experience of reading of I Can Do Anything.
“This book is such a phenomenal collection of stories of Princeton’s women athletes,” said Novakova, as quoted on Princeton Athletics website. “I could not put the book down after I first opened it, and I read until the wee hours. I am humbled by the achievements of the other women and terribly proud of being counted among them.”
Lind, for her part, was moved by Price’s work. “The women featured in this book, with all of their amazing accomplishments, are such great representatives of all of the inspiring and incredible women who competed at Princeton in the first
50 years,” Lind said on the website.
“Their stories hit home with me and spoke directly to my own experiences as a Princeton woman athlete.”
Price, for his part, has been heartened by reaction he has received since the book has come out.
“The response has been amazing; I was a little worried, it is risky,” said Price. “I am writing about people who I didn’t really know. I felt like trying to capture who they were I might have missed their personality. Instead the feedback I have gotten is that ‘you have captured me.’ I have gotten so many emails from people who are in the book and not in the book. I have been overwhelmed by the response I have gotten, it has just been fabulous. It makes me feel like I accomplished what I set out to do.”
By bringing to life the accomplishments of the Tiger women athletes, Price has grippingly captured a special era in Princeton and sports history.