CHC's Kuklick steps down as A.D.

by TOM UTESCHER

Janice Rensimer Kuklick, whose career as a coach and athletic administrator at Chestnut Hill College spanned 27 years, has resigned from the post of Athletic Director at the local school. Kuklick, who moved from Assistant Athletic Director up to the head job in 1990, will still teach physical education classes at CHC.

In the realm of sport, she has helped the college progress from a single-sex school with modest athletic ambitions into a co-educational institution which in 2003 put a team into an NCAA Division III post-season tournament for the first time.

In addition to undergrad and graduate degrees from what was then West Chester State College, Kuklick brought outstanding credentials as an athlete to her post at Chestnut Hill. Her high school lacrosse teams at Plymouth Whitemarsh and her college teams at West Chester never lost a single game. In 1975, she played defense wing on the first U.S. Women's Lacrosse Team ever to defeat the English National Team on British soil.

In 1979, the U.S. Women's Lacrosse Association created the Beth Allen Award as the highest honor which can be bestowed upon a post-college player, and Kuklick was the inaugural recipient. She retired as a player in 1981, and was later inducted into both the Pennsylvania and the National Hall of Fame.

Kuklick arrived at CHC in the fall of 1977 along with Lorraine Busch, who officially held the title of Athletic Director. Kuklick oversaw the field hockey and lacrosse programs, as well as the now long-defunct badminton team, which played in the winter. Hockey was phased out after the 2002 season, giving way to a popular and successful women's soccer program.

"Between the two of us, we coached all of the teams ourselves back then," relates Kuklick, who continued as the Griffins' lacrosse mentor up until 2001.

Participating in the old Philadelphia Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the Griffins had their share of successes, particularly in lacrosse, basketball, and hockey.

The hockey and lacrosse teams were distinguished by their "bumblebee" uniforms, which sported broad horizontal stripes in the old school colors of brown and yellow. The college altered its athletic hue to red and white at the end of the 1990's.

"That was brought on by the marketing people for the college, because the brown and yellow just wasn't a real flashy color combination," Kulick chuckles.

During her tenure there have been numerous changes in the college's facilities. The school's main soccer and lacrosse field has been greatly enlarged and re-graded, and of course the indoor sports, basketball and volleyball, received a major boost when the Sorgenti Arena opened in 2001.

Before that the athletes were confined to an archaic, subterranean gym which suffered almost continuously from moisture seepage from the surrounding earth. Occasionally, the hardwood floor would buckle to an extent where anyone walking across the gym resembled a sailor coming ashore after several years at sea.

"It's a nice auxiliary gym for us now," the retiring A.D. says. "It's funny to think that it was our primary gym up until a few years ago."

Road games posed other challenges.

"When we started out, we were all stuffed in cars," Kuklick recalls. "I ruined my car from all the times I crammed kids into that little Honda to go to hockey and lacrosse games. Later on, we had two vans donated to us, and now we travel everywhere in real buses."

Kuklick will now be able to do more traveling on her own to follow the athletic activities of her two college-age sons. Clay, who just turned 22, is a baseball catcher going into his senior year at Kutztown University, and Luke, two years younger, is a junior tight end for the football squad at Bloomsburg. Her husband, Glenn, worked for many years in the physical education and athletic departments at Springfield High School before retiring in 2002.

She sees good things ahead for Chestnut Hill.

"The men coming in [in the fall of 2003] has brought a lot of new energy to the whole school," she says. "It's just going to grow and grow."