[3] She attended the University of Delaware but the school did not have a women's athletic program at the time, with Hitchens thus playing sports in local leagues and at intramural levels.
[4] In 1967, Hitchens began serving as a teacher as well as the women's basketball and field hockey coach at Springer Junior High School.
[2] Hitchens was hired to the staff of the women's basketball team as coach of the freshman squad.
[2] She later recalled that all three startup teams (basketball, swimming and field hockey) had a combined budget of $1,500 and that players often bought their own uniforms; women were also not allowed to use the sports facilities used by men and thus had to play on poorly-made fields, or, in the case of the swimming team, had to play their games away due to the facilities being inadequate for competition against other schools.
[3] Hitchens was named the ECC Coach of the year on four occasions and made the team a "national power", winning the conference championship three times while playing in the national playoffs six times, which included four appearances in the Final Four and a second-place finish in 1978.
[6][8] Additionally, she served on the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) executive council from 1983 to 1986, on the University of Delaware's Commission on the Status of Women, including two terms as chair, was a designated National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) senior woman administrator from 1977 to 2006, was a member of the NCAA Field Hockey Committee for four years, which included two years as chair, and was the first woman to be president of the North Atlantic Conference,[9] in addition to being the vice president, chair of the gender equity committee and member of the field hockey sports committee in that conference.