School Sport

It started with a broken nose.Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.’s broken nose, to be exact. When the president’s son got his snout in a snafu in a college football game, the elder Teddy called together the presidents of five different institutions to deal with the growing issue of safety in school sports. The leaders of those institutionsincluding the military schools of Annapolis and West Point and the now-Ivy-League schools Harvard, Princeton, and Yaleagreed that something must be done, and decided to form a governing body for collegiate sports in 1908. Originally known as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, the organization was renamed to the more-manageable National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910.Today, a large part of the NCAA’s role is matching up schools based on training, facilities, and scholarships. The current three-division system (with Division I and Division II schools able to offer scholarships) was decided at a 1973 convention. The decision to include women’s athletics was finalized in 1982, when the NCAA opened up to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.Originally operating out of the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago, the NCAA has moved over the years in accordance with its growing responsibilityand to prevent it from influence by specific conferences. It moved to the Fairmount Building in Kansas City in 1952 and made several moves across the state since then. The most recent move was to White River State Park in Indianapolis, conducted back in 1999. Visitors to this location can also check out the NCAA Hall of Champions, a museum and conference center which highlights “shining moments” from NCAA history. In case you’re wondering which schools hold the most championships, they are UCLA (106), Stanford (99), and Southern California (91).