Dartmouth College Athletics

Kathy Slattery Phillips (H)

Induction:
2009

Kathy Slattery Phillips beame the face and voice of athletics during her 30 years in Dartmouth’s sports information office.

To students, athletes and otherwise, coaches, administrators, the news media and everyone else she touched as she served Dartmouth (nearly 25 years as the sports information director) and the Ivy League, she was more than the repository of facts large and small about all Green teams.

Kathy was a friend and confidante. She smiled with eyes that could as easily turn an intern or assistant to stone if there was a lesson not properly learned — or, if someone needled her about never getting a hole-in-one during her long career as a superb golfer.

Slats took pride in having covered 305 consecutive Dartmouth football games dating from a win over Penn in the 1976 opener (before she joined the Dartmouth staff). She took equal satisfaction in being on hand annually for the Heptagonal cross country championship at Van Cortlandt Park in New York and for the indoor-outdoor Heps, wherever the meets were held.

Until she married Corey Phillips in 2005, Kathy’s world revolved around athletics at Dartmouth (and golf between spring and fall seasons). She became the m other of Corey’s young children, Carter and Lizzie. Their love affair only added another dimension to her time management skills (Lizzie was too young but she immediately put Carter to work with the press box gofers).

It was a typically frenetic Dartmouth sports weekend in November 2007, when football season was ending, winter sports were in motion and Floren Varsity House was being deicated that Kathy, wrapping up an issue of Big Green Sports News on a Sunday afternoon, suffered the brain aneurysm that took her life at age 55, leaving a void that really can’t be filled.

Chuck Young ’88, as sports editor of The Dartmouth and then as one of Kathy’s interns, described the experience of working for Slats:

“She was a demanding boss with unrivaled intensity and attention to detail. She was not Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada but they had a lot of the same DNA.

“She wielded a legendary red pen. I was an English major but I learned as much about how to write and re-write from Kathy as I did from any professor.

“She made you better than you imagined you could be.

“Once you earned her respect, you had no stronger advocate.

“When you contacted her, as an alum, she always made you feel like you’d never left.”

A cum laude graduate from Syracuse University, Kathy wrote about Dartmouth for the Manchester Union-Leader before she moved into Alumni Gym in 1977.

Many people have said that Kathy was really the “fiber” of Dartmouth athletics, one of a handful of women who helped to shape athletics during the early years of coeducation at Dartmouth. She was an athletic woman with iron will and distinct touch. No one cared like Kathy. No one remembered like Kathy. No one could bake cookies like Kathy. Dartmouth was her life’s work. Her fingerprints are all over the place. She touched everyone — coaches, students, staff.

Wearers of the Green