Oregon’s club crew team became national news in 1972.

First-year coach Don Costello brought Vicky Brown onto the team and watched his competitors complain.

“Oregon State and Washington wouldn’t go up against us because we had a woman in the boat,” recalled Phil Bowman, who was on the team. “It was in The Register-Guard and The Oregonian had big articles about it day after day. Even Kenny Moore wrote about it for Sports Illustrated. It was fun.”

Moore, the former Oregon distance runner and Olympian, penned a story that published on April 17, 1972, inside an issue that featured Jack Nicklaus on the cover after winning The Masters for the fourth time. He told the story of Brown, a freshman coxswain who earned a spot on Oregon’s top boat amid protests from other schools.

“Being a national figure was a little hard to fathom, but I remember getting a lot of letters,” Brown, now Vicky Lindsey, recently recalled. “It was surprising, but it was fun.”

Oregon’s current club crew team recently held a reunion for the ’72 boat that brought Costello, Lindsey and a few others back to Dexter Lake to retell the story of that season.

“I graduated from Cal and I stay connected to that program and there was a woman who went to Berkeley from 2004-08 on a full-ride scholarship as a woman coxswain for a male crew and won three national championships,” Costello said. “She knew about Vicky Brown before she met me. That’s the kind of legacy that Vicky has.”

Costello was recruiting the campus for rowers when he pulled the team’s old school bus up to Hayward Field’s east grandstand to pick up a couple of his athletes and noticed Lindsey, who had a friend on the team.

“Don said ‘Hey, come aboard’ and I said ‘Sure’,” Lindsey said, recalling the conversation of 47 years ago. “I guess I have always been a person who was spontaneous and looking for challenges. I had always done individual sports in high school, so just being on a team was a new experience.”

Costello was short a coxswain — the team member responsible for steering the boat and coordinating the rowers — and put Lindsey in that seat.

“She was the oldest of seven kids so she knew how to be in charge of people, even as a freshman,” said Costello, who lives in Coos Bay. “She stuck with it and did everything that everyone else did except lift weights because I didn’t want her bulking up. She ran and sat in the rain and she was a leader.”

When the season started in January, Costello put Lindsey on the roster and submitted it to Wendell Basye, a UO law professor who served as the faculty representative for the team. Costello pointed out that while club crew featured schools from many different conferences, an agreement was in place that each team would honor the certification of all schools.

The Western Intercollegiate Crew Coaches Association had a rule against women participating in men’s crew, but the NCAA had no restrictions.

“There was no such rule,” Costello said. “I took a logic class as an undergraduate and knew a false premise leads to a false result. So I wrote all this up for Professor Basye and he said ‘She’s eligible.' From our standpoint, it was that simple. She was one of us. Over the years, people asked why we didn’t start a women’s crew and the reason was because she was one of us. I was not going to get rid of one of our people. It caused a huge kerfuffle. My old coach at Cal wouldn’t speak to me for years.”

Washington coach Dick Erickson expressed his displeasure with The Register-Guard columnist Blaine Newnham.

“I just can’t imagine a girl sitting in there for us,” Erickson said. “The best thing we have done is put women in their own crew. At Washington, we expect a heck of a lot more of a coxswain than (Oregon) does. We aren’t looking for somebody to just ride in the boat and steer it. The coxswain on our crew is one of the most valuable members. He’s the quarterback, the race director. I can appreciate Oregon wanting a small person riding in the boat, but we will not race them if they use a girl.”

Oregon State took a similar stand.

“The Beavers’ coaches told their athletes that if you raced against her, you would lose your eligibility,” Costello said.

When the Ducks went to race a Washington team in Seattle, the Huskies had sent their top two boats up to an invitational meet in Vancouver, B.C. Erickson was scheduled to be on that trip so Costello spoke with UW’s freshman coach, who agreed to let Lindsey race. However, Costello arrived to find out that Erickson stayed in Seattle to make sure no woman would compete against his team.

“Erickson tried to woodshed me once and I listened carefully and said ‘I don’t tell you who to put on your team and you don’t tell me who to put on mine’,” Costello said. “And I added, 'I’m from Berkeley and we don’t put limits on people. I don’t put limits on Vicky Brown’.”

The Oregon team voted unanimously not to race that day without Lindsey. UW then accused the Ducks of grandstanding by traveling to a race that they knew they would not be allowed to compete in with a woman in the boat.

“They’re calling me a male chauvinist pig and all of that, but the rules don’t allow female coxswains,” Erickson told reporters in Seattle.

Oregon found opponents who would compete against a woman including Pacific Lutheran, Seattle University and University of Puget Sound. A tradition in crew was for each coxswain to yell “Shirts” at the start of a race, indicating they were confident enough to bet their shirt on a victory.

“It was kind of weird to yell that when there was a girl in your boat,” joked Mike Marsh, a teammate of Lindsey’s at Oregon. “The other teams kind of snickered and laughed and then we’d beat their socks off. It was fun because they all thought having a girl on the team meant that you were not going to be any good, but that worked out well because we would beat them.

"Vicky was a pioneer, she dealt with a lot of adversity. To come out and do this without any other background as a freshman was quite a statement. For Don to take a chance on her and stand up to Washington and Oregon State was a big deal. It was a challenging time.”

It was certainly a challenging time for the 18-year old newcomer to crew.

“It was disappointing of course that Washington and Oregon State wouldn’t race, but other schools thought it was a real novel idea and fun,” Lindsey said. “It did get a little overblown I felt with Oregon State and Washington and that is where the national attention came in.

"It was a club sport (at Oregon), so you have to love it. You don’t get a scholarship and that was part of what appealed to me. I was working with people who really cared about what they were doing.”

Lindsey lives in La Quinta, Calif., after working for 32 years as a vice president of human resources.

“It becomes a matter of taking all your experiences and putting them into leadership and I have been in a leadership role for most of my career,” Lindsey said. “I have always been a champion of the underdog. In HR, you get the opportunity to find those gems of people who have potential and then you want to help them grow and learn. That would be what I’d say is the biggest legacy. I’m always looking for that person who doesn’t know their own potential and you have to bring it out.”

Costello was that person for Lindsey.

“I owe it all to Don,” she said. “You have to have someone who is going to have the vision and support you. I had good coaches and good teammates, everyone was welcoming. Everything mellows over time. It was a wonderful experience.”