“Well, I’ll be a lot more cautious about my donations,” Marsha Dodson ’75 told The Sun.
When she discovered that the University razed the field hockey turf named after her in November 2024, Dodson was both baffled and furious. For one, she only learned that her namesake field had been destroyed after an alumnus — not the University — broke the news to her, she said.
But the real sticking point for Dodson — a former Cornell student-athlete who said that she has donated more than $1 million to Cornell Athletics — was that Marsha Dodson Field was destroyed with no regulation turf for the women’s team to use for the 2025-2026 athletic season, except one more than 50 miles away in Syracuse.
“I was incredibly angry and disappointed when I found out,” Dodson said, describing the ordeal as “a monumental blunder” on Cornell Athletics’ part. “They took the field up before they had a new place for the team to play, so I was really, really angry, and I went on a warpath. It was just plain dumb.”
Cornell had planned to relocate the field hockey team to a new location at Game Farm Road. However, the move has been set back. The delay in construction follows a series of complaints about environmental concerns from Ithaca residents over the proposed field’s use of synthetic turf.
What irked Dodson especially was the lack of communication from Cornell Athletics, she said, blaming Director of Athletics Nicki Moore for the mishap.
“If the previous athletic director, Andy Noel, was still there, I would have gotten a call, and I would have been included [in conversations about the move],” Dodson said.
Moore declined to comment on Dodson’s accusation that the University “messed up” the field-change process.
“Marsha Dodson has long championed women’s athletics at Cornell, and we’re grateful for all she does for her alma mater,” Moore wrote in an email statement to The Sun, adding that the “new Cornell field hockey facility will be among the very best in the Northeast and we look forward to moving the project toward completion.”
In an announcement last month, Moore admitted that she had “made mistakes in not offering adequate communication” about the field change. “I should have shared developments with the field hockey community along the way,” she wrote, “and I should have listened to my project team colleagues when they warned me of growing timeline risks.”
Dodson said she has had “quite a few phone calls” with Interim President Michael Kotlikoff recently as the University discusses alternatives for the team. The University, she said, has “stepped up to the plate” to cover for what she described as Moore’s “mistake.”
Through a spokesperson, Kotlikoff referred The Sun to Moore’s statement for this article.
Dodson said she has donated to field hockey, women’s tennis and softball because of inequalities in women’s sports at Cornell that she experienced as an undergraduate tennis player in the ’70s.
Her hope was to support young female athletes. Now, she is worried that the future of field hockey is in jeopardy.
“If this is more than just this season, it will kill the field hockey program,” Dodson said, warning that the program might struggle to recruit new players.
“Even though these things happened, it’s being fixed by the University, and they are trying their best to remedy the problem,” Dodson said, adding that she hopes “this never repeats itself.”
