The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, and one in Canada. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges and helps over 500,000 college student athletes who compete annually in college sports. The organization is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Sports injuries are injuries that occur during sport, athletic activities, or exercising. In the United States, there are approximately 30 million teenagers and children who participate in some form of organized sport. Of those, about three million athletes age 14 years and under experience a sports injury annually. According to a study performed at Stanford University, 21 percent of the injuries observed in elite college athletes caused the athlete to miss at least one day of sport, and approximately 77 percent of these injuries involved the knee, lower leg, ankle, or foot. In addition to those sport injuries, the leading cause of death related to sports injuries is traumatic head or neck occurrences.
The participation of women and girls in sports, physical fitness, and exercise has been recorded to have existed throughout history. However, participation rates and activities vary in accordance with nation, era, geography, and stage of economic development. While initially occurring informally, the modern era of organized sports did not begin to emerge either for women or men until the late industrial age.
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) established in 1940, is a college athletics association for colleges and universities in North America. Most colleges and universities in the NAIA offer athletic scholarships to their student athletes. $1.3 billion in athletic scholarship financial aid is awarded to student athletes annually. For the 2023–24 season, it had 241 member institutions, of which two are in British Columbia, one in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the rest in the continental United States, with over 83,000 student-athletes participating. The NAIA, whose headquarters is in Kansas City, Missouri, sponsors 28 national championships. CBS Sports Network, formerly called CSTV, serves as the national media outlet for the NAIA. In 2014, ESPNU began carrying the NAIA Football National Championship.
A head coach, senior coach, or manager is a professional at training and developing athletes. They typically hold a more public profile and are paid more than other coaches. In some sports, the head coach is instead called the "manager", as in association football and professional baseball. In other sports, such as Australian rules football, the head coach is generally referred to as the senior coach.
An athletic coach is a person coaching in sport, involved in the direction, instruction, and training of a sports team or athlete.
Sex verification in sports occurs because eligibility of athletes to compete is restricted whenever sporting events are limited to a single sex, which is generally the case, as well as when events are limited to mixed-sex teams of defined composition. Practice has varied tremendously over time, across borders and by competitive level. Issues have arisen multiple times in the Olympic games and other high-profile sporting competitions, for example allegations that certain male athletes attempted to compete as women or that certain female athletes had intersex conditions perceived to give unfair advantage. The topic of sex verification is related to the more recent question of how to treat transgender people in sports. Sex verification is not typically conducted on athletes competing in the male category because there is generally no perceived competitive advantage for a female or intersex athlete to compete in male categories.
College athletics in the United States or college sports in the United States refers primarily to sports and athletic training and competition organized and funded by institutions of tertiary education in a two-tiered system.
An athletic scholarship is a form of scholarship to attend a college or university or a private high school awarded to an individual based predominantly on their ability to play in a sport. Athletic scholarships are common in the United States and to a certain extent in Canada, but in the vast majority of countries in the world they are rare or non-existent.
In college athletics in the United States, recruiting is the process in which college coaches add prospective student athletes to their roster each off-season. This process typically culminates in a coach extending an athletic scholarship offer to a player who is about to be a junior in high school or higher. There are instances, mostly at lower division universities, where no athletic scholarship can be awarded and where the player pays for tuition, housing, and textbook costs out of pocket or from financial aid. During this recruiting process, schools must comply with rules that define who may be involved in the recruiting process, when recruiting may occur and the conditions under which recruiting may be conducted. Recruiting rules seek, as much as possible, to control intrusions into the lives of prospective student-athletes. The NCAA defines recruiting as “any solicitation of prospective student-athletes or their parents by an institutional staff member or by a representative of the institution’s athletics interests for the purpose of securing a prospective student-athlete’s enrollment and ultimate participation in the institution’s intercollegiate athletics program."
Student athlete is a term used principally in universities in the United States and Canada to describe students enrolled at postsecondary educational institutions, principally colleges and universities, but also at secondary schools, who participate in an organized competitive sport sponsored by that educational institution or school. The term student-athlete was coined in 1964 by Walter Byers, the first executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The term is also interchangeable with the synonymous term “varsity athlete”.
The Le Moyne Dolphins are the athletic teams that represent Le Moyne College, located in DeWitt, New York, in NCAA Division I intercollegiate sporting competitions. The Dolphins compete as members of Northeast Conference. Le Moyne had been a member of the NCAA Division II Northeast-10 Conference since 1996. At the end of the 2022–23 academic year, Le Moyne began the transition to NCAA Division I as a new member of the NEC.
Issues related to race and sports have been examined by scholars for a long time. Among these issues are racial discrimination in sports as well as the observation that there are overrepresentations and underrepresentations of different races in different sports.
Athletics is a term encompassing the human competitive sports and games requiring physical skill, and the systems of training that prepare athletes for competitive performance. Athletic sports or contests are competitions which are primarily based on human physical competition, demanding the qualities of stamina, fitness, and skill. Athletic sports form the bulk of popular sporting activities, with other major forms including motorsports, precision sports, extreme sports and animal sports.
A strength and conditioning coach is a physical performance professional who uses exercise prescription to improve the performance of competitive athletes or athletic teams. This is achieved through the combination of strength training, aerobic conditioning, and other methods.
Liam Hennessy FRAMI is an Exercise Physiologist, Strength and conditioning coach and former international athlete from Cappawhite, Tipperary, Ireland, who competed in the pole vault, and has worked both with professional athletes and teams and as an academic researcher. He founded the distance learning institution Setanta College.
Health issues of athletics concern the health and well-being of athletes who participate in an organized sport. If athletes are physically and mentally underdeveloped, they are susceptible to mental or physical problems. Athletes trying to improve their performance in sports can harm themselves by overtraining, adopting eating habits that damage them physically or psychologically, and using steroids or supplements.
Maverik Stadium, also known as Merlin Olsen Field at Maverik Stadium, is an outdoor college football stadium in the Western United States, on the campus of Utah State University in Logan, Utah. The home field of the Utah State Aggies of the Mountain West Conference, it opened 56 years ago in 1968 as "Romney Stadium" and currently has a seating capacity of 25,100. Its field has a traditional north-south alignment, and sits at an elevation of 4,710 feet (1,435 m) above sea level. The playing surface was natural grass through 2003, and is currently AstroTurf GameDay Grass.
Clutch performance in sports refers to the phenomenon where athletes excel under pressure, commonly known as "in the clutch". These moments can occur at any point during the game, and involve plays that significantly impact the outcome of the game. Athletes are required to summon strength, concentration and any other qualities necessary to succeed and perform well. This phenomenon is observed in many sports including basketball, hockey, football, and esports, but the phrase is most commonly used in baseball.
Russell T. Whitt is the head strength and conditioning coach for the Troy Trojans football team in Troy, AL. He previously served as an assistant S&C coach with the Army Black Knights football team at the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY in 2019 and as the head S&C coach for the Texas Tech Red Raiders football team in Lubbock, TX from 2016 to 2018 and the Louisiana-Lafayette Ragin' Cajuns football team in Lafayette, LA from 2010 to 2016.
