Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 23

Section Section 3 Worn Ann Landers en 3 MP Decatur Review, Founded 1878 DECATUR, ILLINOIS, SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 1976 Decatur Herald, Founded 1880 Long distance runner Nancy Kramer finds her interest in indoor diversions dwindling. Monopoly? "I don't like it. It takes too long," she says. Julie Dunn played dolls but outside, on the front steps of her house. Every girl displayed early athletic abilities and was not diverted from developing them.

Marcia Morey beat out the boys in a sixth grade foot race. Julie Dunn was a good kickball 'player. At the same time she Do Female Athletes Share Same Traits? everything, I was looking up to my older sisters, trying to be as good as they were," says Marcia Morey. Childhoods were active, marked by vigorous outdoor play with children of both sexes. Hide and seek, football, jump rope, basketball these games drew the girls to play that demonstrated their physical talents.

None of the girls remembers spending much play time indoors. By Sara Dykes What does one outstanding female athlete have in. common with another? Some similarities are obvious a competitive spirit, a zest for physical activity, physical health and agility. But are there parallel sociological and psychological factors that have contributed to the female's emergence as an athlete? A look at four young Decatur women all promising Decatur's world-class swimmer Marcia Morey practices at least four hours daily in Olympic training. So Tired of Being Wef Marcia Morey Swims Toward Olympics i-'" I 4 girls to achieve.

Parents are supportive of their daughters' efforts in sports. Themselves athletes or otherwise achievers, fathers especially are pleased to see their daughters excel. They do what they can to hel the girls develop athletically, with financial help, coaching, chauffeuring and pep talks. But every girl emphasizes hers have not been pushy parents the "mommy and daddy behind the fence" as Julie Dunn calls them. Ahead Penny Hammtl Last February in an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) qualifying meet, Nancy ran the mile in 5:19, just 10 seconds off the national record for her age.

She's been working on trimming her time ever since. Both she and her sister, Karen, a MacArthur High School student, are members of the Chicago based Prairie State Striders Track Club and the AAU. The clubs sends its members to meets, often out of state, where competition may be stiffer. No track clubs exist locally, and hitching up to one so far away has its drawbacks, Nancy admits. It means long weekend hours on buses to meet up with the team.

It means missing the coaches daily supervision. "Sometimes we don't find out we've been doing something WTong (until later) or he's told the others to do exercises." Track competition among girls- in Central Illinois has been lax, due to the lack of school sports programs for girls, until recently, according to Nancy. That's the reason she chose to run last year on the boys' track team instead of the girls more meets, more competition. "If you practice at a slow pace," she says, "come to find out, you run the meet that way." She also ran on her school's boys' cross country team last fail. Nancy appreciates her parents' encouragement of her and her sister's running.

"Every place we go, he usually says something to somebody," says Nancy about her proud father. Ralph Kramer has even taken his daughters to an indoor track in Champaign twice a week just so they can practice. Now, a new YMCA membership will allow Nancy practice running throughout the year. Nancy also plays the alto clarinet at school she may practice it daily more than she does running. "She works hard," her older sister, Anne, says.

"She excels in everything she's interested in." "I mean, I'm normal like everyone else," Nancy objects. Nancy has always wanted to enter the Olympics, though, and since she started running in AAU meets, she realizes the dream just could come true. Even now, she distinguishes between the thrill of winning and a deeper satisfaction she has gained from the sport. "If you go at it just for the purpose of winning, that's not really right. "Running is the whole purpose of running." It makest you a little proud of yourself, she says, to know you're capable of doing something very well.

Related Story on Page 24 was learning to read and write, Penny Hammel was learning the proper golf swings. Nancy Kramer was winning grade school races. All strive to excel and tend to succeed not only in their sports but in other interests like academics and music. Yet competitiveness seems to take second place to another inner drive to prove something to themselves. "I want to do the best I can do," they say.

Home life has encouraged the Runner, Golfer High Hopes Two friends at Roosevelt Middle School are among the crop of young females emerging in Decatur sports. Thirteen year old Penny Hammel is collecting golfing trophies. Nancy Kramer, also 13, is a long distance runner who has her eye on the Olympics. "Her dad says she's natural," Mrs. Richard Hammel of 860 W.

Leafland Ave. says about her daughter's golfing talent. Hammel should know a good swing when he sees one he's the golf pro at Faries Park. In the summers, Penny lived on the golf course where her parents worked. The only girl in a family with five boys, she was learning to swing a golf club under her father's tutelage by the time she was 7.

"I wanted to do it 'cause I was out there every day," Penny says simply. "There isn't much else to do. "Dad encouraged me to play. He'd stand out at the driving range and watch me hit balls." And, she says, he never yelled at her. Third youngest in her family, Penny played rounds of golf with her brother Scott.

A hint of sibling rivalry persists when they kid each other about their golf games. "She likes to beat the boys and make 'em feel embarrassed." Scott says. Penny disagrees. "I like to see how well I can do." Her mother says she's like that in everything she does schoolwork and other sports, like volleyball and basketball. Penny never played much indoors.

Instead, she wras outside, playing jump rope, hopscotch or street football with the neighborhood kids, who were mostly boys. "Whenever they played street basketball or football, they'd always come yell for Penny," Mrs. Hammel says. A few years ago Penny entered a city women's golf tournament and surprised herself by winning first place in the fourth flight division. Last summer, Penny missed winning the city women's golf championship by four strokes, placing second to Marilyn Dechert, a veteran golf player.

With early successes under her belt, Penny is hoping for a career as a professional golfer. And she says no one least of all her dad is forcing her that direction. "I'm not under a lot of pressure. It doesn't matter if I win or lose." Nancy Kramer was serious enough about running that her mother bought a subscription to Runner's World Magazine. Somewhere a mistake was made and the computer caught the WTong code numbers.

Now Nancy gets a copy of Good Housekeeping regularly. Next to the youngest in a family of nine, Nancy has been running all her life to catch up with older brothers and sisters. "I used to always like to run, to play tag," the petite eighth grader says after rushing home from her afternoon paper route. Daughter of Mr. and Mrs.

Ralph Kramer of 1050 N. Pine Nancy began racing classmates in third grade and in sixth grade won a mile and a half race in a city wide school track meet. Long distance running is her speciality. a sprinter. I don't have the legs and the speed.

It's not that I'm too short," she hastens to add. "I just don't have the speed." athletes indicates that yes, there are likenesses among them. How much one can generalize from the likenesses remains a question, though, for the social scientist. But it's interesting that among the four females, all 20 or under, not one is a single child. Not one is the oldest child.

In fact, sibling rivalry may have accounted some for their drives to excel. "In about her training and reverse her post Pan-Am games blues at Indiana University, where she enrolled this month. She is training under Dr. James A. "Doc" Counsilman, renowned coach of Indiana's championship swimming teams.

"The older I get, the more I start to realize there arc other things in life. I used to have the attitude, all people get up early in the morning and swim. "In a way I feel like swimming has been so selfish. I'm doing so much for myself. "The reason I got into swimming was to get away from people.

Now I'm developing relationships and friendships with people. It takes my mind away from swimming and toward people. "I have some of the greatest friends in the world. It would be easier if I hadn't met them. The best thing for my swimming would be to go to Florida or California and start training.

"Now I've got relationships here, and I don't want to leave. "I just hope to hold out. I'm 20. I've been the oldest on the team. I could never make it four more years." She'll do the best she can, yet there's more to life than meter after meter of chlorinated water.

It's a bittersweet time for her. On the threshold of the pinnacle of achievement, Marcia Morey pauses and measures herself. And then, like she'll do, the next few months at least, she plops back into the swimming pool. jump rope and roller skated with the neighborhood boys and girls, most of whom were older than she. "I was a tomboy in some Julie Dunn P' I It jf it.

Carl said, I believed him." The next summer, Marcia had set her first women's, nar tional record. She won the 100-yard breaststroke in 1:05.53 in Dallas at a national Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) meet. "Swimming is a sport where you can set your goals nearsighted and keep trying to improve them," Marcia says. "There's a progressive ladder you can see." At the top of the ladder was the 1976 Olympics, by 1974 a goal no longer inconceivable to the swimmer. Johansson left last year for the University of Wisconsin, but Marcia didn't follow as he expected.

Inadequate facilities there, according to her. She stayed at Millikin University. Meanwhile, her mental attitude about swimming has slipped, she feels and to her that's about half the contest. At the Pan-American games in Mexico last October, she suffered what she considers her biggest and first real defeat in a race she should have won. "My opponent psyched me out.

Before we got to the pool, she told me, 'I had the best nap I ever had! I feel so "Then she said, 'I understand people came down from your 'city. You must feel a lot of "She had me mentally. It was my fault I shouldn't have let her get to me," Marcia grins and shakes her head. "She won." Marcia hopes to accelerate haircut. Chlorine from pool water won't let it grow.

Yet there is gold to gain next and others are watching her. "They have, this Decatur Swim Club (for young competitors). It seems so pressurized. I know I couldn't do it," she says. The irony is, her own success may have spawned some of the pressure youngsters feel now to succeed.

'Have Fun' "I get worried when I see some of the younger kids take swimming so seriously. They say, 'I want to be like "One thing about my parents. They never pushed. They were interested, but it's always been my decision. So many times pushy parents completely destroy ability in a child." Lately Marcia has begun to analyze the deeper reasons why she chose to swim and swim and swim as an adolescent.

"I felt out of place with my peers. I wasn't ready to grow up. I remember going into high I didn't want to be grown up. I just wasn't ready for it. I kind of left the scene and went into swimming.

I felt insecure." "I never thought I could be anyone particularly good until I met Carl Johansson," she says. Swimming coach at Millikin University, Johansson noticed the high school junior's performance with the YWCA swim team. He convinced her to stay home from camp that summer to start training for the Olympic trials "We worked together on that first goal, and we reached Dunn's Mother could tell "something was cooking" when Julie Dunn wanted to stay home from camp to play tennis all summer. Julie had liked camp so much, and now her home away from home was the Fairview Park tennis court clubhouse. How very different from the summer a year or two earlier when Jerome Dunn of 1527 W.

Riverview Ave. had persuaded his overweight daughter to take tennis lessons. And Julie, a budding teenager shy and self-conscious about her weight, discovered she wanted to be good at tennis very good. "I just played and played. It was kind of an escape.

.1 just kind of fell in love with the sport. was something I could relate to," the slim 17-year-old says now. The coach cf the Country Club of Decatur needed someone to enter the butterfly race at a swimming meet about 12 years ago. 'I'll swim it!" piped up Marcia Morey. "What is it?" Marcia didn't get to enter the race.

Despite her enthusiasm, she wasn't good enough then. Now, Marcia at 20 is a world class swimmer, Decatur's own record breaker training for the Olympics. Almost four years ago, she began a rapid and comparatively late climb that vaulted her from YWCA to a world-ranked swimmer. She has swum in meets from New Zealand to Yugoslavia to Colombia. Almost wistfully, she recalls the carefree early years she splashed and raced with other kids.

"Sometimes I wish it were still those days. There was no pressure. It was still fun." Youngest of three daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Morey of 275 Park Place, Marcia grew up with a love for sports and competition.

Her father urged his daughters to do their best in what they tried, and Marcia heeded his advice. "In almost everything, I was looking up to my older sisters, trying to be as good as they were," she remembers. "Being the youngest in a family of girls, my dad had a lot of be a tomboy and all that." Army, Football The other children on Marcia's street were boys with whom she played army and football. Her favorite gifts were guns and robots. "I was my dad's boy.

I never played with dolls." She loved all kinds of sports. In grade school, she got in trouble with a teacher for playing kickball with the boys. Girls weren't supposed to do that, she was told. She won a 600-yard dash in school, too her opponents were boys. Another teacher, maintaining girls shouldn't beat boys at games, wouldn't let her class watch the race, Marcia says.

But swimming was one sports program in Decatur open to girls. Though top swimmers usually begin training by age 8, Marcia was still swimming for fun. She would be well into high school before she began training seriously. Looking back, she's thankful for the late start. "I'm really glad I was older.

Right now, I'm getting tired of it quickly." She swims four hours a day. She is tired of being wet. Her hair is short-cropped, and it's been two years since she had a Nancy Kramer runs near her Decatur home. First Tennis: It Was Kind of an Escape' Photos by Doug Goumon or five hours a day. In the winter, she practices an hour or two daily at an indoor tennis club.

She plays on the girls' tennis team at Mac Arthur High School. Next summer, she wants to join the Illinois team in the Junior Whiteman Cup, which pits Midwestern tennis players in a round robin match. Julie wants to play tennis in college. That's her goal for now. Turning professional sounds glamorous and exciting, but she knows how stiff its competition is.

Playing and practice take time away from other activities, too. "I really worry too much about my game," she frets. "I still don't have confidence Something about having a fat childhood affects the rest of your life." ways. In other waysi I wasn't. It was a happy medium, I think." She liked to play with dolls, for instance on the porch steps.

"I spent NO time indoors. I would go out in the snow after I got out of school. I never got cold." Julie wishes now she had started playing tennis earlier. "If I have kids, I think I would start 'em when they're 4 or 5. But I'd never push 'em.

"So many parents push them. know, mommy and daddy behind the fence." Her own parents at first underestimated their daughter's ambition, then supported her, but never pushed her, Julie says. "It's gotta be your own desire." She plays enough now to get sick of the game at times. In the summer, it's practice four The first summer she played, she won second place in a tournament sponsored by the Decatur Recreation Department. "Everybody plays in the Rec tournament.

You can hold a racket for a week and play." Now, she is considered a top if not the top girls' tennis player in Central Illinois. This climb came after hours of devoted practice in the sport. For Julie had something to prove. To herself, if no one else. Improving one technique at a time, Julie found her competitiveness intensifying in tennis.

Losing got harder and harder to take. "I hate to lose," she says emphatically. "I'm just not passive about it." Julie had always enjoyed physical activities. As a child, she played kick the can and.