After teaching monitor and area for 20 years, Ali Muhsin began the Philadelphia-based, co-ed Philly Elite Observe Membership in 2023. Over the a long time, the veteran coach by no means had athletes participate within the Colgate Ladies’s Video games (CWG).
Scheduled to participate in a day New York Metropolis monitor occasion final November, Mushin left Pennsylvania very early within the morning — early sufficient to attend a registration session for the forty ninth annual Colgate Ladies’s Video games and join a few of his women to take part within the 2025 sequence.
“I’m super excited and the girls are too. This is our first year competing in Colgate, but I’ve been hearing about it for years, being in the track world,” Muhsin stated on the indoor Nike Observe and Subject Middle on the Armory, which hosted the Colgate Video games.
Shifting ahead, some Philly Elite runners and a shot putter made progress within the sequence. By the semi-finals in late January, solely Aminah Muhsin — the coach’s daughter — was nonetheless within the working, besting her opponents as the highest point-scorer within the Video games’ Elementary A division of the 55-meter sprint because the Feb. 1 CWG’s finals approached.
Watch archived movies of particular person Colgate Ladies’s Video games’ sequence occasions or all the webcast of Preliminary #1 , Preliminary #2, the Semi-Finals or the Finals, by choosing the “Videos” hyperlink within the Media part of every respective sequence occasion web page. The occasion web page — on the Armory Observe.org web site — additionally contains meet outcomes.
In every divisional occasion, the three high opponents with the best variety of factors for all meets mixed will win academic scholarships valued at $2,000, $1,000 and $500, respectively.
“Colgate Women Games has been a tremendous experience,” stated Muhsin. “The atmosphere has been awesome, the competition electrifying and our athletes were pumped to receive the Colgate book bags and goodies,” he added, referring to the Colgate-Palmolive well being and hygiene merchandise given to members who register for the sequence.
As Colgate Ladies’s Video games meet director, Fred Thompson would level out the particulars of the game to younger newcomers (l.), and take the time to present athletes encouragement (r.). (LEM PETERKIN)
Along with sharing objects from its huge product line with the athletes, Colgate additionally promotes initiatives from its philanthropic arsenal, resembling its “Bright Smiles, Bright Futures” oral well being schooling program. Nevertheless, the principle objectives of the CWG sequence are to create a constructive and supportive setting for its members to excel in, and to advertise schooling.
Open to college students in elementary college by seniors in school and past, the long-running novice monitor and area sequence simply accomplished its forty ninth profitable season this month. In 2026, the Colgate Ladies’s Video games will mark its fiftieth anniversary. The sequence’ half-century celebration will acknowledge these Video games’ all-important pro-women messages, and an alumni that features Olympic athletes and scores of profitable professionals in myriad fields.
“There is so much to celebrate with the Colgate Women’s Games after seasons 47 and 48 moved to an outdoor competition due to the pandemic,” stated Sally Massey, Chief Human Sources Officer for the Colgate Palmolive Corp., commenting on CWG’s upcoming fiftieth anniversary. “We were thrilled to return indoors for season 49. And we know that season 50 will be a wonderful celebration of the impact the Games has had and will continue to have on our community.”
Nevertheless, the fiftieth milestone celebration will owe a profound debt of gratitude to the late Fred Thompson of Brooklyn, the legal professional who sacrificed his authorized profession to function full-time coach of Brooklyn’s Atoms Observe Membership, the staff which he based on the rules of athletic excellence and tutorial achievement, and which has served because the mannequin for the Colgate Ladies’s Video games for 49 years.
With Colgate’s dedication, Thompson’s constructive mantra that originally empowered inner-city women from the neighborhood was vastly expanded. Now that message additionally reaches women and girls in dozens of cities and hundreds of suburbs, villages and townships alongside the East Coast of the U.S. — from Boston to Baltimore and past. It’s develop into an ethnic and financial kaleidoscope, with athletes from all races and earnings teams.
It’s laborious to imagine that Thompon’s invaluable Atoms Observe Membership idea of athleticism and schooling — that started Colgate’s practically 50-year-long company dedication — was handed to a high-ranking firm govt, hand-written on a easy restaurant serviette. However Thompon’s message clearly outweighed its medium of supply. Immediately, the Colgate Video games are the most important novice monitor sequence for women and girls in america!
“So, the Atoms were the model upon which the Colgate Games were founded, because it [the CWG] is based on the principles of athletic and academic excellence,” stated Cheryl Toussaint, a former Atoms Observe Membership member and a U.S. Olympian who turned CWG meet director after Thompson retired from the submit in 2014. “Those are the two driving initiatives upon which the Atoms existed, and Colgate Women’s Games exist — to make sure that girls have the opportunity to compete, learn to develop their talent in the sport, and take it as far as they can. And then, the other side of that is understanding and instilling the importance of education.”
Olympic medalist Cheryl Toussaint, who’s now the meet director of the Colgate Ladies’s Video games, is pictured on the indoor monitor area inside ‘The Armory,’ on Fort Washington Ave. in Manhattan on Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Each day Information)
Mentioned Massey, “Our partnership began in 1974 when Fred Thompson, a U.S. Olympic Track Team coach, accomplished U.S. attorney, sportscaster and founder of the Brooklyn Atoms Track Club, recognized the need for more positive outlets for girls living in underserved neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Colgate-Palmolive has remained the title sponsor for nearly five decades, supporting the program’s mission to empower young girls and women through sports and education.
Colgate received its all-important “athletic and academic excellence” mission from a serviette that Thompson handed to Colgate-Palmolive Chairman and CEO David Foster, after a dialog at luncheon within the previous Mama Leone’s Restaurant in midtown Manhattan within the Nineteen Seventies. “We were at a luncheon at Mama Leone’s, so it was probably a dinner napkin,” Toussaint stated, noting that “Freddie didn’t waste any time jotting down his thoughts for a Colgate Women’s Games prototype!” Apparently, Thompson entrusted his idea to the fitting individual.
As a Colgate Video games excessive jumper clears her top, a shot putter is poised to throw. (LUKE SCHLAIFER/COLGATE WOMEN’S GAMES)
Colgate’s conveyance of Thompson’s unyielding focus has produced hundreds of constructive, inspirational tales:
Machelle Sweeting ran within the fifth Colgate Video games, and stated it had an amazingly constructive impact on her life. She’s now an Performing Justice of the New York State Supreme Courtroom.
Walter Brown, of suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., introduced elementary, mid-school and highschool college students to compete within the first Colgate preliminary meet. Impressed by the Colgate ambiance, he plans to resurrect his Remington United Flyers monitor staff, which he estimates received “roughly $70 to $75,000 in scholarships” through the years as Colgate finalists. He additionally says his twin daughters began with Colgate as “8- and 9-year-olds.” They’re now college students at State College at Oneonta and Central Connecticut State College.
Then there are the preschool women sprinting exterior the perimeter of the Armory monitor, emulating the older Colgate athletes and embracing an infectious, “Yes, I can do it” feeling of empowerment.
Elementary A runner’s depth on the monitor is just not tempered by her cute Sew character socks from the 2002 animated comedy, “Lilo & Stitch.” (LUKE SCHLAIFER/COLGATE WOMEN’S GAMES)
Thompson, who died on the age 85 in 2019 from issues of Alzheimer’s illness, was raised by his uncle and his spouse. He would carry his aunt’s sage recommendation all through his life. She informed him, “Life is two things,” the New York Occasions reported in Thompson’s obituary. “One, get an education, because once you have a college diploma nobody can take that away from you. And two, get involved with people.”
A runner in highschool and school, Thompson attended Brooklyn’s Boys Excessive College, then graduated from Metropolis Faculty of New York. He earned a legislation diploma from St. John’s College College of Regulation in 1958 after which served two years within the U.S. Military as a member of the Decide Advocate Basic Corps, stationed within the Republic of Panama. In 1961, he was admitted to the New York State Bar. Beginning with personal apply, he had a powerful authorized profession — working as “assistant attorney general for the State of New York, staff attorney with ABC-TV, Madison Square Garden and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as doing legal work for the Internal Revenue Service,” his obituary stated.
Involved in regards to the challenges and pressures children confronted in his group, Fred turned a volunteer counselor for girls and boys at P.S. 21 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in accordance with his obituary. Thompson labored as a civilian volunteer with the Police Athletic League (PAL), a nonprofit youth growth group in New York Metropolis, and later based the Atoms Observe Membership.
“I think once he went into the military and came back, he realized that there weren’t a whole lot of options for kids in our neighborhood; our areas were neglected and run-down,” stated Toussaint. “They didn’t have any mindset that there were any other options.”
Anna-Maria Thomas, a PAL runner on the time, recalled that the institution of the all-girls Atoms happened after Thompson had discussions with Connie Ford, the revered longtime head coach of the PAL’s co-ed monitor program. “Connie Ford had the only women’s team that was really doing something,” stated Thomas, 80, who was recruited by Ford for the PAL women’ staff when she was 13.
Thompson was impressed as a result of Ford’s PAL women’ monitor squad had developed a formidable status and produced some nice athletes. Sprinter Meredith Ellis, the youngest member of the 1956 Olympics staff, 1960 Olympic excessive jumper Barbara Brown and different star athletes have been coached by Ford, who turned ladies’s head coach for the U.S. staff on the worldwide Pan Am Video games in 1963.
Years later, Ford could be chosen as head ladies’s coach for America’s staff on the 1968 Olympic Video games, and Thompson could be named an assistant coach of the U.S. monitor staff within the 1998 Seoul Olympics.
Wanting again, Thomas stated, “Our coaches were always good friends. They were best friends. And they had the best female runners in the city,” she added, noting that Thompson and Ford have been alumnus of Brooklyn Boys Excessive College.
Longtime Colgate runner Regina Ford Cahill, a 2024-2025 competitor, in 2012 photograph flanked by Fred Thompson and Cheryl Toussaint. (LEM PETERKIN)
However earlier than the Atoms have been conceived, Thompson approached Ford with a proposal. Thomas recalled, “Freddie asked Connie, ‘Can I work with you on your team?’ and Ford immediately said, ‘No, get your team, so that we have more women. We can deal with two, maybe three, or four teams. We need to address the female athletes that have no place to go. Make your own team!’ That’s how the Atoms came about.”
Initially a co-ed enterprise, the Atoms turned an all-girls staff. On the time, women — in contrast to boys — didn’t have college groups and wanted alternatives to apply and compete year-round.
Being the highest ladies’s groups within the metropolis, the Atoms and PAL groups would battle fiercely on the monitor and area meets, however after the competitions, the athletes have been pals. “We were competitors only on the track,” stated Thomas. “Once we got off the track, we were not competitors; we were good friends.”
Within the early days of the Colgate Video games, when Thomas was the varsity ladies’s monitor coach at St. John’s College in Queens, she introduced members of the college’s all-white ladies’s monitor staff to take part in Colgate occasions.
“This was in 1975, and I was so excited that I decided to take my entire team to Colgate and have them compete,” stated Thomas, noting, “At that time, it was the largest contingency of any team that came to run the Colgate — and it was all white. I just said, ‘Let’s go and run’ to give our team more competition. I was so honored that Freddie appreciated what I did.”
Along with the company sponsorship, over the a long time the Colgate Video games have been constantly supported by occasion staffers and volunteers (a lot of whom are former Atoms and lifelong monitor aficionados), knowledgeable medical staff and tons of of appreciative mother and father and coaches.
Kali Council, Colgate staffer for 30 years, ultimately turned a highschool shot putter after getting encouragement and steerage from Jean Bell, a former Atoms staff coach. Bell based the Jeuness Observe Membership in 1985; her monitor staff contains yoga, cardio and anaerobic exercises, and worldwide journey for her athletes.
Council, who works as a licensed therapist, a psychotherapist and a social employee, is absolutely conscious of Thompson’s lasting and influential legacy. “If it wasn’t for him, all this [Colgate Women’s Games] would not be here,” she stated. “He was the coach of my coaches, so a lot of the training and the mentality is still in all of us because of him.”
For details about the Colgate Ladies’s Video games, join its mailing checklist at www.colgatewomensgames.com and comply with the monitor and area sequence on Instagram.
