Equal Footing

Once a top athlete whose options were limited in the time before gender equity in sports, Alyce Sigler now volunteers at the Bentley, where a bit of serendipity has her researching Title IX.

By Katie Vloet

Over the summer, Alyce Sigler was giddy when she talked about the Summer Olympics in Paris. “Did you know that we have 15 University of Michigan swimmers at the Olympics this year? Fifteen! Representing 11 different countries!”

Sigler volunteers with the varsity swimming and diving teams at Michigan, so her enthusiasm wasn’t surprising. Yet she was also looking through another lens: that of a one-time top athlete who competed in a pre-Title IX world.

Sigler was 17 at the 1964 Olympic trials, competing in backstroke and individual medley. She swam well but did not win the chance to compete at the Tokyo Olympics that summer.

She then headed to U-M as a business student, and she joined the women’s swimming team. But this was 1965, and the swim team was a far cry from what it is today: it was a club team and wouldn’t be added as a varsity sport for another decade, and women swam in the recreation Margaret Bell Pool rather than the Matt Mann Pool that was home to the men’s varsity team.

She swam for two years, and the club team did very well, winning what was then called a National Championship in 1966. A varsity program, though, may have provided the rigor to set her up for future success. “If I’d come 10 years later, it would’ve been vastly different,” Sigler says. “I think then I’d have had a wonderful opportunity to try for the next Olympics.”

Sigler turned her focus solely to academics and earned her BBA in 1969, then a master’s of library sciences in 1970. A career as a management consultant at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and a managing director at the multinational law firm Seyfarth Shaw followed.

In 2009, she returned to Ann Arbor, where she has been active as a member of the Advisory Board for Intercollegiate Athletics, a program director with the men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams, a volunteer with the U-M Museum of Art, the opti-Mize student social impact program in LSA, the Women’s Health Leadership Board at Michigan Medicine, and much more.

Alyce Sigler looking at historical documents at the Bentley Historical Library.

She recently met Bentley Director Alexis Antracoli and told her about her affinity for libraries. The conversation evolved into her taking on volunteer duties at the library, beginning with a project researching Title IX, the landmark 1972 federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at any school that receives federal funding.

It’s a perfect fit, Sigler says. “I have been aware of the influences of Title IX on women’s sports for a long time, of course,” and she has learned much more while digging through dozens of boxes in the Bentley archives. Ultimately, her research will be used by a faculty member who is teaching about Title IX and who reache dout to the Bentley for assistance.

Sigler was doing her research during the time of the Paris Olympics over the summer. For the first time, the Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games in 2024 featured gender parity: half the athletes were women, half were men. It is the same kind of equity envisioned by the authors of the Title IX legislation a half century ago.

“It’s wonderful for all the young girls coming up today,” Sigler says. “They have so many choices, a whole world of choices.”