Give Another Hoiah!
By John W. Gearan
Holy Cross Magazine
Memories of those bicentennial spring afternoons flow back easily.
Jeanne DelSignore would be in slight panic mode, grabbing her kit
bag of cleats and cudgel, skirts and shirts and bolting from her
science labs. Full-tilt, she would race down hillocks, past Alumni
Hall and hurtle herself toward Freshman Field. He knew that she
would be late for lacrosse practice, though there resides no lax in
her. She is all hustle, then and now.
“Usually I’d be late, but less than 10
minutes,’’ recalls DelSignore, who also played four
years of Crusader field hockey. “Our coaches, our professors
all understood and encouraged us to play sports. Yet we had to
arrange to make up classes and tests. At Holy Cross, scholar always
comes before athlete.”
In 1976, she was a trailblazer, among the fourth class of coeds to
enter Holy Cross. She was determined to break barriers: as an
athlete, during the infancy of Title IX that aspires to level
athletic fields for women in America; as a professional, heading
toward a career as a doctor; as a super woman, who would do it all.
And, accomplishing her goals, DelSignore now enjoys a flourishing
career as a surgeon while being married with three children and
volunteering as an energetic activist for establishing ethical
boundaries for sports and medicine.
In her first year, lacrosse had just been elevated from a club to
a varsity sport. The team drew women who were already adept at
handling a field hockey stick, including DelSignore.
Back then, the dark ages of the sport were still in the rearview
mirror. The lacrosse sticks were wooden, there was no protective
gear such as goggles, and nobody referred to “lacrosse
moms” as a voting bloc. There were no arc lights or modern
artificial turf fields like those that grace the top of Mount St.
James today.
“We did have some good athletes from towns like Wellesley
and from prep schools,” DelSignore recalls. “And our
lacrosse women’s team could beat Boston College any time, any
place!”
DelSignore is one of eight children born to Louis and Jeanne
(Muir) DelSignore, who both hailed from Worcester. Her mom, a
French teacher, received her degree from Clark University and
earned her master’s degree at Worcester State College. Her
dad is an engineer and graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute;
his work for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Pease Air Force
Base in the early 1960s landed the family in nearby Dover, N.H.
Achieving a 4.0 grade point average at Dover High, DelSignore
excelled as well in lacrosse and field hockey. She studied biology
one summer in a program for gifted students at the St. Paul’s
School in Concord, N.H. Top colleges coveted her talents. Impressed
by a Holy Cross representative at a college fair, she decided to
visit the campus during her third year of high school. DelSignore
liked the coziness and camaraderie of the College nestled in her
birthplace. She knew Holy Cross would provide a top-rate premedical
program. And there would be a chance for her to compete as a
tenacious, nonstop midfielder in field hockey and lacrosse.
DelSignore reflects fondly on her time on the Hill.
Of course, there were the unforgettable games, such as the time
Holy Cross faced down Amherst in the spring of 1979. “Our
goalie and our backup goalie were both sick. Our coach Jan Demars
told me I was IT. I hated playing goal,” recalls DelSignore,
the team’s co-captain. The Crusaders needed her. All game
long, perhaps itching for action, DelSignore attacked the
attackers, aggressively coming out of net to cut down
opponents’ angles. She rattled them, deflecting shots and
causing misfires.
In the end, DelSignore had posted a shutout as Holy Cross
prevailed. Later Coach Demars hand-decorated a lapel pin for her
showing a woman tossing a graduation cap in the air and yelling,
“I did it!” That pin remains among her treasure trove
of memories.
While DelSignore prefers not to talk about victories or her
individual achievements in lacrosse and field hockey, she was a
highly decorated scholar-athlete. Receiving the John C. Lawlor
Award as the College’s outstanding student-athlete her final
year, she also became the first female and first lacrosse player to
be presented with the John A. Meegan Athletic Achievement Award by
the Holy Cross Varsity Club.
“I learned so many life lessons at Holy Cross,”
DelSignore remarks. “Sports taught me the importance of a
unit working toward a common goal. They instilled values such as
fair play and teamwork. I learned about motivation and how to
budget my time while playing two sports and handling
premed.’’
Most of all, DelSignore says, she walked away from Holy Cross, not
with a scorecard of victories and losses, but with a strong sense
of helping others. Some of her off-the-field time was spent with
fellow student-athletes volunteering at Abby’s House for
battered women, serving meals, sorting clothes and helping wherever
they were needed.
Holy Cross took DelSignore by the hand and showed the way to her
life’s path. A 1983 graduate of the University of Rochester
(N.Y.) Medical School, she has become a nationally respected
orthopedic surgeon specializing in the treatment of hands.
DelSignore married Ned Ballatori, Ph.D., a molecular scientist she
met at the University of Rochester.
The couple has raised a trio of lacrosse players: Sarah, a
Brighton High standout who played varsity for Yale in her first and
second years, has decided to play intramurals and concentrate on
her studies as a premed molecular biology major; Rachel, an
All-American midfielder at Brighton (N.Y.) High, is playing varsity
midfielder for Johns Hopkins University where she is a second-year
student, majoring in behavioral biology; Alex, a first-year
student, is blossoming as a Brighton High soccer and lacrosse
player.
Her children’s involvement in youth lacrosse drew DelSignore
back into her favorite sport. “I figured I would be at the
games watching as a parent,so I might as well help out with the
coaching,” she says. Wholeheartedly embracing her hectic
schedule, DelSignore spends workdays examining patients or
performing surgery, with the rest of her time devoted to being a
spouse, mother, coach and member of a dizzying number of medical or
lacrosse special committees. She has also coached local teams and
all-stars in regional, state and national tournaments.
How does she manage all this, switching scalpels and lacrosse
sticks?
Sometimes she actually combines roles. Once, while at a lacrosse
game, a 13-year-old boy broke his arm. DelSignore, rushing onto the
field, convinced parents, coaches and trainers that she could treat
the boy—who was suffering terrible pain from a severe
60-degree break—on the spot: “Why wait for hours in an
emergency room,” she reasoned. With a trainer holding the
boy, DelSignore yanked the bone back into place and then fashioned
a cast from materials on site. Follow-up exams showed that, without
the benefit of X-rays, she had aligned the fracture perfectly.
With all this multitasking in perpetual motion, DelSignore has an
important compass in her life: Simply put, it is doing the right
thing. Since her days at Holy Cross, when she took an elective
called Medical Ethics, DelSignore has developed a passion for
understanding ethical behavior: in medicine, in sports—and
everywhere.
The first woman to chair the Ethics Committee of the American
Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, DelSignore helped design codes of
conduct for doctors in her field. In addition, she spearheaded the
development of the first Code of Ethics for U.S. Lacrosse, setting
standards of behavior for member coaches, volunteers, players and
parents.
For DelSignore, telling right from wrong is a relatively simple
matter: In medicine, the patient should always come first, she
says. In youth sports, the player’s welfare should always be
the primary concern. And, DelSignore concludes, one should never be
too busy to help those in need and behave ethically.
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of
Holy Cross Magazine.
John W. Gearan, was an award-winning reporter and columnist at the
Worcester Telegram and Gazette for 36 years. He resides in
Woonsocket, R.I., with his wife, Karen Maguire, and their daughter,
Molly.
