"I wish," says Ellie Chance of Philadelphia, "that the boys would accept me as a sailor first and a girl second." Ellie, who began skippering at 11, has been trying to teach the boys to accept her that way for the better part of her life. "You might say she was born in a floating cradle," says her sailor father, Dr. Britton Chance, who was a 1952 Olympic gold medalist in 5.5-meter sloop racing. Today Ellie (seen here with Teammate John Rush) is commodore of the University of Pennsylvania Yacht Club. Moreover, she is the only girl sailor in the Middle Atlantic Intercollegiate Sailing Association (Penn, Drexel, Haverford, Princeton, Swarthmore and St. Joseph's).
Ellie suspects some men in the association still regard her presence with mixed feelings. But one whose ambivalence ought to suit her just fine is the Penn club's faculty adviser. Says Dr. Charles Price: "Ellie is a nice girl, yes, but she's a very good sailor."
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