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( National Collegiate Athletic Association)
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA, often pronounced "N-C-Double-A") is a voluntary association of about 1,200 institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States and potentially beginning in 2008, Canadian universities.[2] Its headquarters are located in Indianapolis, Indiana, and it is currently under the leadership of president Myles Brand. The NCAA is the largest collegiate athletic organization in the world, and because of the great popularity of college sports among spectators in the United States, it is far more prominent than most national college sports bodies in other countries.[citation needed] 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.[3] In 2006, Divisions I-A and I-AA were respectively renamed the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). Its 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 the three major Ivy League universities, Harvard, Yale and Princeton to several meetings at the White House in October, 1905, to discuss steps to make college athletics safer. [4]The IAAUS was created as one of the outcomes of those meetings. The IAAUS 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 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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