NCAA History & Fun Facts
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a voluntary association of about 1,281 institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Its headquarters are located in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was under the leadership of president Myles Brand until his death on September 16, 2009 from pancreatic cancer.
In August 1973, the current three-division setup of Division I, Division II, and Division III was adopted by the NCAA membership in a special convention. Under NCAA rules, Division I and Division II schools can offer scholarships to athletes for playing a sport. Division III schools may not offer any athletic scholarships. Generally, larger schools compete in Division I and smaller schools in II and III. Division I football was further divided into I-A and I-AA in 1978. Subsequently the term "Division I-AAA" was added to delineate Division I schools which do not field a football program at all. In 2006, Divisions I-A and I-AA were respectively renamed the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and Football Championship Subdivision (FCS).
The NCAA's predecessor, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), was established on March 31, 1906 to set rules for amateur sports in the United States. When then-president Theodore Roosevelt's own son, Ted, broke his collar bone playing football at Harvard, Roosevelt became aware of the growing number of serious injuries and deaths occurring in collegiate football. He brought the presidents of five major institutions, Army (West Point), Navy (Annapolis), Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to several meetings at the White House in October 1905 to discuss steps to make college athletics safer. The IAAUS was created as an outcome of those meetings and became the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910.
Until the 1980s, the association did not offer women's athletics. Instead an organization named the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) governed women's collegiate sports in the United States. By 1982, however, all divisions of the NCAA offered national championship events for women's athletics and most members of the AIAW joined the NCAA.
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