"We were a totally motley crew," she says. "We were horrible...It looked like a pick-up game."

The team's ragged appearance even caught the attention of a Mad Magazine photographer who snapped a picture of the squad during their 1971-72 season.

"We didn't have any funding for women's athletics," she adds. "It's so hard to imagine that things were that backwards."

Carty's college experience was very different from her colleagues,' thanks to an unusual decision she made in the summer between her sophomore and junior years. It was then that she married Brian T. Carty'71, whom she began dating as a first year student.

"It wasn't a rational decision. I certainly didn't know anyone else who was doing it," she says. "But it felt like an emotional mandate to me."

Carty says her college experience was characterized less by extracurricular activities than by the friends she made. What she remembers most about college, she says, was "wearing a silly bathrobe and talking for hours." One evening, a friend who was a gourmet cook was baking a chocolate cake from scratch. Before being served, the cake caved in like a disappointing souffle.

"She was devastated," Carty says. "But I ate the whole thing. I really gained her respect, though I felt pretty sick."

Carty was also a devoted student, who left her hometown of Pleasantville, N.Y., to attend boarding school in Massachusetts.

"I was not one of those people who didn't go to class," she says.

'Everything Seemed Possible'

After graduation, Carty went to work as a personnel officer at a small insurance company. Carty says she felt like part of the real world, unlike many of her classmates who went to professional schools because they were unsure what to do with their lives.

"I remember feeling a little self-satisfied that I was facing up to having to pay the rent," she says.

When Carty became pregnant with her first child, she realized that the agency would not let her work part-time. She decided to stay at home with her baby, and she remained there as she raised two more children until she came to work for the RCAA in 1991. Two years later, Carty was working full-time as the chief administrator of the nearly 30,000-member organization.

"I felt conflicted about staying at home when all my friends and certainly all of my school friends were working," she says. "I felt out of step with the world."

But Carty says her return to the RCAA, around her 20th reunion, provided her with a group of women who understood the choices she faced.