Читать книгу Alternative Models of Sports Development in America. Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health онлайн

57 страница из 90

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).