Cabrini University Athletics

The par 3 hole was only 147 yards away but beyond the range of Dorothy Crowley’s 81-year-old eyesight. She took aim at the hazy rumor of a flag and let fly.

"All of a sudden, the three men with me were jumping up and down," she recalled. "I said, ‘What’s happened?’ They said, ‘You’ve got an ace!’

"My first hole-in-one. And the funniest thing is, I couldn’t see the hole."
That was two years ago near her home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. At 83 Dorothy Crowley still plays golf and tennis.

More than six decades ago, Crowley dedicated her life to the novel concept that women could develop their athletic skills and never find themselves stuck at home while the men went out to play. At 16 she spent a summer touring the Northeast with an all-star softball team that took on local all-male squads and played one memorable game in Madison Square Garden.

The Queens native attended the Savage School for Physical Education for three years, until the Manhattan school merged with hated archrival NYU. Unable to stomach the idea of an NYU degree, she graduated instead from Columbia in 1943 and went on to coach high school basketball. One year she led tiny Cabrini High School to the city Catholic-school title game.

When the principal, Sister Ursula Infante, decided to open a college near Philadelphia, it took some doing to pry Crowley away from New York. But in 1957 she signed on as Cabrini’s first "physical education director."

Crowley organized and coached the basketball, field hockey and softball teams, taught classes in golf, tennis, archery and badminton, and established the first athletic field and fieldhouse.

"At first we had to invent places to play," she recalled. "We had to be careful where we set up the archery equipment on campus, or we’d wind up with moving targets."

After four years, Crowley moved back to New York and spent many years as assistant principal at John Adams High in Queens before retiring in 1979.

For Dorothy Crowley, "retiring" meant traveling the world, snorkeling in Australia and The Philippines, and getting together with former Cabrini students – now grandmothers – when they come down to Florida.
"It’s such a joy seeing them," she declared. "And it’s always good to have someone younger to play golf with. Someone who can see."