Sports at Juilliard?

Dance notwithstanding, sports is pretty much the last thing that Juilliard brings to mind, but there is a hidden history of athletics here

It’s no secret that President Polisi loves baseball. The sport comes up periodically in his speeches and writings. One of his proud accomplishments is that while serving as president of Juilliard he was also named Little League manager of the year. Sabrina Tanbara, assistant dean of student affairs, fondly recalls his explanation of what makes the Yankees so great to then-student William Harvey (MM ’06, violin) on the D train to Yankee Stadium for a student outing. And Amanita Pleasant-Heird, director of special events, says she’s never seen our president so excited as when Yankee shortstop/superhero Derek Jeter came to Juilliard. So it’s not that surprising that if Juilliard were to have any affinity with sports, it might mostly be with baseball. But the Polisi Years have also seen a number of other athletic endeavors.

Starting in the 1986-87 school year, Juilliard students fielded an ice hockey team, the Fighting Penguins. Its lifetime record in four annual Maestro Matches, against the New England Conservatory Penguins (unclear who picked the mascot first) was 2-2. Juilliard also had a tennis team from the 1970s to the 1990s with opponents including Cooper Union, Fordham, and the Crosstown Club. It was coached by Baird Hastings until he was in his 80s, well after retiring as Juilliard’s orchestra librarian, in 1985.

The late ’80s also saw an interest in running not unrelated to Polisi’s own. The school’s first Rite of Spring party, in 1989, included Run for Fun and Juilliard Challenge races around the plaza with, among many others, Polisi running and New York Philharmonic music director Zubin Mehta banging the Phil's gong as laps piled up (for more about the Rite, see Year 5 of the Polisi Years Timeline). Later that year Juilliard took part in another running-related event. ABC commissioned Bill Conti (BM ’65, composition), who’d written the score for Rocky, to create Marathon Suite, and the Juilliard Orchestra gave the work its world premiere, under Conti's baton, at the start of the marathon and continued to play throughout the three-hour-long television coverage of it. (About 25,000 people ran in the 1989 marathon, slightly less than half the amount that ran it in 2017.)

These days, Juilliard sports is mostly—well, pretty much entirely, confined to the faculty-staff (and occasionally student) softball team. Called the Juilliard Marauders in the early 1990s, the team came back to life in 2003, with James Gregg and Kate Dale among the members then who still come out each season. Still going strong, the more benignly named Penguins crushed the Guggenheim Museum squad to win its division in 2014—and begin their 2018 season later this month.