If economics and business graduate Allan Woods ’51 hadn’t grown up in Rye, N.Y., he might never have discovered the sports love of his life. The president of the N.Y. Amateur Sports Alliance has been involved with field hockey since his youth, when he befriended the son of Henry Greer, coach of the early U.S. Olympic field hockey teams.
During the war years, when English naval vessels stopped in the east coast of the United States, they often ventured up to Rye to play field hockey with Greer’s teams.
“That’s what really got me started,” he says. Though Woods played soccer at Lafayette, he joined hockey matches whenever he could.
Woods was active in the effort to bring the Olympics to New York City in 2012 and has been to seven of the past eight summer games (missing the boycott year of 1980) in official capacities. Last year, he received the inaugural presentation of the Pan American Hockey Federation’s Order of Merit award.
A member of the national team from 1958-64, the closest he came to playing in an Olympiad was in 1964. Only one North American team qualified for the eight-nation field hockey competition in Tokyo that year, but the U.S. team was to be an alternate. When Rhodesia dropped out, the United States was asked to join, but the U.S. Olympic Committee declined.
“They didn’t have the budget,’ Woods recalls. “So they played the Olympics minus one team. That was one of the things that stayed with me from 40 years ago. That motivated me to get more involved.”
A second-generation, loyal alumnus, Woods says the College “has always been quite important in my life.” He and his late friend and former roommate John Dillon’51 were regulars at Lafayette-Lehigh football games.
While there were special professors, what has stayed with him most is the campus atmosphere.
“There was a general, overall influence that helped me grow up,” he says. “When you do that, you’re ready for the world.”