TOSH FORDE
soccer

inducted February 18, 2006

The Columbia women's soccer program began in 1986. By the 1995 season, it could boast its share of fine players. But none approached the artistry and skill of the woman who first took the field in 1995, Elizabeth “Tosh” Forde.

From 1995-98, Tosh Forde was the most notable player at Columbia, the one perhaps most responsible for Columbia's emergence as a viable Eastern power. When Forde graduated from Columbia, she had established herself as one of the most decorated student-athletes in the program's history and in the Ivy League. 

Forde holds several of Columbia's all-time records, including career goals (30), career assists (26), career points (86), goals in a season (17 in 1996) and points in a season (47 in 1996). During the 1996 season, Forde also led the Ivy League in points and goals.

A two-time co-captain, Forde was a senior co-captain on the 1998 team that posted a 12-2-5 record, arguably the greatest team in Columbia women's soccer history. A two-time All-Ivy selection and an Academic All-Ivy honoree as a senior, Forde received the prestigious Connie S. Maniatty Outstanding Senior Student-Athlete Award in 1999.

Since graduation, she spent two years coaching and playing in the women's league of the United Soccer League and has worked in community and business development for Massachusetts Premier Soccer's Boston Renegades and the Cape Cod Crusaders. She spent many of the years after graduation traveling around the country and the world — hiking in the Rockies, living in Los Angeles and biking through Ireland. She kayaked and competed, especially in triathlons. She coached soccer players ranging in age from three to 61.

Forde worked as a business consultant in areas as diverse as organizational strategy, crisis management and development for a start-up recreation firm.

A native New Englander, Forde has gloried in the Super Bowl triumphs of the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox' World Series victory. This summer, she returned to New York. Now living on Manhattan's West Side, she is a first-year M.B.A. student at NYU's Stern School of Business.