INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS
Educationally embedded sports, throughout their history, show both similarities and differences with regard to other models of sports development and governance. The unique relationship of education and sports, forming the primary sports development model in America, essentially happened by accident. It began with American university students seeking recreational opportunities outside the few intramural activities available within their particular institution by organizing sporting events with other colleges, presumably to test their athletic prowess, manhood, and superiority in various events. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, student bodies and even administrations at prominent universities were progressively more determined to win in these rudimentary, student-organized intercollegiate sports, sometimes at any cost. While football was the main focus, other sports were also rising to sufficient importance in colleges’ profiles that certain institutions began to turn a blind eye to academic requirements just to get athletes onto the field. Professional baseball pitchers were becoming campus stars, playing college baseball under pseudonyms. Coaches were inserting themselves and nonstudents into football games.
In the early days of American higher education, faculties and administrators had never planned for anything as frivolous as organized athletics. The concentration was to be solely on academics. But students increasingly clamored for recreational activities that would offer a respite from the daily rigors of academic life (Chu, Segrave, and Becker 1985). Many faculty members recognized that this was actually beneficial to the academic progress and success of the students (Falla 1981). Whether it was a rowing regatta between Harvard and Yale in 1852, or the first “football game” between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869, these relatively little-noticed, social, yet oftentimes very competitive events were the precursors to today’s nationally popular, multibillion-dollar industry of intercollegiate athletics (Staurowsky and Abney 2011).
While the concept of a sports development model being primarily embedded within higher education might seem somewhat strange to observers who are not native to the United States, intercollegiate athletics have been a part of higher education and university life even outside the United States since the early eighteenth century, when athletics were made part of the curriculum at the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. Intercollegiate competition in the United States is traced back to before the first recognized intercollegiate athletic rowing event in Boston in 1852, to as early as the 1820s, with no-holds-barred football and rugby games between Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. These “informal” events predate most organized athletics in America, scholastic or professional, including baseball (Ridpath 2002; Falla 1981; Howard-Hamilton and Watt 2001; Zimbalist 1999).
After the first official organized football game, pitting Rutgers against Princeton in 1869, proved to be very popular among the students and alumni as a social event, the faculties of the two schools canceled the following year’s contest because they feared an overemphasis on athletics as opposed to academics (Funk 1991; Zimbalist 1999). This strong faculty intervention might be one of the few times, if not the last, that university faculty exercised such control over the growth and power of college sports. Later, and to the disgust of the faculty, representatives of athletic interests (commonly known today as “boosters”) from both schools tried to leverage the very popular contest to raise funds to acquire property to build their own football fields. The 1883 game, played at the Polo Grounds in New York City, drew more than ten thousand fans and generated the money for the boosters to pay for the new fields. For the first time, intercollegiate sports were beginning to dictate university policy and conflict with academia in ways not even imagined (Zimbalist 1999).
New sports such as baseball and track and field were beginning to be established on college campuses across America. Contests were popular, but, as mentioned previously, many of the athletes were not even registered students at competing universities and colleges. There were even early reports of pay-for-play and recruitment of high-level athletes, mostly nonstudents, to play at certain schools. There was not a national or even regional governing body to harness what was becoming a burgeoning industry within the hallowed halls of academia, but it became apparent that governance was needed.
THE NATIONAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION
Several attempts at organizing an intercollegiate athletics governing body were made before the eventual formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as the primary and best-known governing body over college sports. On January 11, 1895, there was a historic meeting of the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, which later became the Big Ten Conference (Byers 1995). This was the first intercollegiate athletic conference on record that made regulations regarding student-athletes’ eligibility and participation (Chu, Segrave, and Becker 1985; Wilson and Brondfield 1967). Academic eligibility and participation rules began to spread across the country at other campuses, but many abuses of academic requirements still existed, and more needed to be done to keep the growing beast of athletics under the academic tent. There were many attempts at reasonable compliance, but manipulations of academic standards and what is referred to today by the NCAA and its member institutions as competitive equity standards needed to be addressed collectively by all higher-education institutions at a national level, before the enterprise became too big to control. Regulation and effective governance needed to start with what was as popular a sport then as it is now, the behemoth known as college football (Falla 1981).
In 1905, a nationwide call for college football reform led to the first steps toward creating a governing body for intercollegiate athletics. Collaboration among institutions was initiated not to address academic, booster, or even recruiting abuses, but to regulate college football on the playing field and reduce the numerous injuries and lack of consistency in the rules (Grimes and Chressanthis 1994). The call for reform in the rules of the game came from President Theodore Roosevelt himself. In the eyes of many, college football, with its mass-momentum formations, few rules, and anything-goes philosophy, had reached an unacceptable level of violent play that resulted in several deaths. President Roosevelt used the prestige of his office to try to calm the fears of a majority of the public about the growing sense of lawlessness surrounding college football, including the abuse of institutional academic requirements now pervasive in intercollegiate athletics. Many colleges and universities, fearing overemphasis on sports and seeing the dangers of the game, eventually suspended football, including Columbia and Northwestern. Harvard president Charles Eliot threatened to totally abolish the game on his campus (Grimes and Chressanthis 1994; Zimbalist 1999).
According to Falla (1981), there was a sense that something needed to be done at the highest levels to regulate intercollegiate athletics, as society clamored for the college game to adopt stricter rules. The response to this public outcry brought about the initial meeting in 1906 that eventually led in subsequent meetings to the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), the forerunner of the NCAA (Watt and Moore 2001; Zimbalist 1999). Although most of the concerns about college athletics focused on excessive violence, questions regarding the relationship of academics and athletics received almost as much attention from the first meeting onward (Funk 1991; Sack and Staurowsky 1998). In 1910, the IAAUS adopted a new name: the National Collegiate Athletic Association. In the words of one of the founding fathers, later the first president of the NCAA, Captain Palmer Pierce of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the association would be forever known as “the voice of college sports” (Falla 1981).
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