Girls Of The Big East

They don't have the intellectual rep of, say, the Ivies; they don't project as macho an athletic image as the schools of the Big Ten. In fact, had they not been lumped together as an N.C.A.A. basketball conference--and a damn good one, at that--the nine colleges that make up the Big East would probably have nothing to do with one another. But they do, and to uncover their finest off-court assets, we asked Contributing Photographers David Chan and David Mecey to pay a visit to this necklace of colleges draped along the Eastern Seaboard. It wasn't an easy project: Many of the schools are small and six of them are Roman Catholic institutions. Consequently, the usual protests were unusually heated. Most school papers refused to run our interview ads; we were picketed and booted out of hotels. But our two Davids returned victorious. Meet the Girls of the Big East.