If you want to know how important Peggy Pruitt has been to Ohio University, take a stroll through West Green and walk past Bob Wren Stadium.
It’s there you’ll see Pruitt Field. It’s not only a pitch for the field hockey team, but also a monument to one of the most influential women to ever step foot in Athens in regards to women’s athletics.
Pruitt was born and raised in Louisville, Ky., and graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in health, physical education and recreation in 1965.
In graduate school, Pruitt took on a heavier workload than most. While pursuing a master’s in physical education in 1969, Pruitt was also the head coach of Kentucky’s women’s basketball team.
Though there’s no record of the Wildcats’ success that season since it was before the enacting of Title IX, Pruitt remembers leading the team to the national tournament and said that balancing school work with the coaching job wasn’t very difficult.
After Kentucky, Pruitt went on to earn her doctoral degree in physical education administration from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urban. Her extensive collegiate resume was critical for her in order to pursue a career in higher education.
“This allowed me to work at the college level, which is where I wanted to work,” Pruitt said. “And it allowed me to do things with the university I would not have been selected to do had I not earned a PhD.”
Ohio University finally became a part of her life in 1975. She was appointed the coach of both the field hockey and tennis teams, as well as coordinator of women’s athletics. It was there that she began to make her mark on Bobcat athletics.
“She was around at a time where women had to fight for their right to play sports,” field hockey coach Neil Macmillan said. “… And she was very instrumental in fighting for everything to be equal, or as much as it could be, in athletics at Ohio. You don’t get a field named after you if you don’t do something special.”
Making the playing field equal for both men and women at the collegiate level was a vital obligation to Pruitt.
“(Gender equality) was very important to me,” Pruitt said. “That’s the one thing, when I took the job, I wanted to accomplish. I’m pleased with the progress the university has made.”
The players on the team who play at Pruitt Field are very appreciative of what she accomplished both on and off the field.
“Peggy Pruitt was a great coach here and her players really loved her, similar to Catherine Brown (another women’s athletics pioneer at Ohio),” senior Cathryn Altdoerffer said. “She was very influential on her team.”
She only served as the field hockey coach for two years and women’s coordinator position for three years before she was promoted to be the associate director of athletics in 1978. It proved to be one of the more gratifying experiences of her career, Pruitt said.
“The ability to work with both men’s and women’s sports was very rewarding,” she said. “And to see areas that relate to the student-athlete was, again, very important.”
Pruitt was promoted once again to senior associate director in 1993, which she held until her retirement in 2001. While she was hard at work serving Ohio Athletics, Pruitt was also serving on committees involved with the Mid-American Conference, the NCAA and the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators, among others.
“Serving on committees is like being a good neighbor in your neighborhood,” Pruitt said. “We all need to volunteer and give back, and I see being on committees as a way of doing that.”
ch203310@ohiou.edu
