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.
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.
Amateur sports are sports in which participants engage largely or entirely without remuneration. The distinction is made between amateur sporting participants and professional sporting participants, who are paid for the time they spend competing and training. In the majority of sports which feature professional players, the professionals will participate at a higher standard of play than amateur competitors, as they can train full-time without the stress of having another job. The majority of worldwide sporting participants are amateurs.
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.
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.
The Academic Progress Rate (APR) is a measure introduced by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the nonprofit association that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, to track student-athletes' chances of graduation. The Academic Progress Rate (APR) is a term-by-term measure of eligibility and retention for Division I student-athletes that was developed as an early indicator of eventual graduation rates.
Redshirt, in United States college athletics, is a delay or suspension of an athlete's participation in order to lengthen their period of eligibility. Typically, a student's athletic eligibility in a given sport is four seasons, aligning with the four years of academic classes typically required to earn a bachelor's degree at an American college or university. However, in a redshirt year, student athletes may attend classes at the college or university, practice with an athletic team, and "suit up" for play – but they may compete in only a limited number of games. Using this mechanism, a student athlete [traditionally] has at most five academic years to use the four years of eligibility, thus becoming what is termed a fifth-year senior. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, an additional year of eligibility was granted to student athletes by the NCAA who met certain criteria. Student athletes who qualified had up to six academic years to make use of their four years of eligibility, taking into consideration the extra year provided due to exceptional circumstances.
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."
Joseph Nocera is an American business journalist, and author. He has written for The New York Times since April 2005, writing for the Op-Ed page from 2011 to 2015. He was also an opinion columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, often referred to simply as the Knight Commission, is a panel of American academic, athletic and sports leaders, with an eye toward reform of college athletics, particularly in regard to emphasizing academic values and policies that ensure athletic programs operate within the educational missions of their universities.
Arian Isa Foster is an American former football running back who is a musical artist under the name Bobby Feeno. He played college football at the University of Tennessee, and was signed by the Houston Texans of the National Football League (NFL) as an undrafted free agent in 2009. Foster was known for his signature Namaste bow, which he frequently performed after scoring touchdowns. He holds the Texans franchise records for rushing yards and rushing touchdowns, and also played for the Miami Dolphins. Foster announced his retirement from the NFL on October 24, 2016.
The National Letter of Intent (NLI) is a document used to indicate a student athlete's commitment to participating in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) colleges and universities in the United States. The NCAA Eligibility Center manages the daily operations of the NLI program while the Collegiate Commissioners Association (CCA) provides governance oversight of the program. Started in 1964 with seven conferences and eight independent institutions, the program now includes 676 Division I and II participating institutions. There are designated dates for different sports, and these dates are commonly referred to as "Signing Days".
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”.
Ramogi Huma is the executive director of the National College Players Association (NCPA), a 501c3 nonprofit advocacy group with a mission to protect future, current, and former college athletes.
O'Bannon v. NCAA, 802 F.3d 1049, was an antitrust class action lawsuit filed against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The lawsuit, which former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon filed on behalf of the NCAA's Division I football and men's basketball players, challenges the organization's use of the images and the likeness of its former student athletes for commercial purposes. The suit argues that upon graduation, a former student athlete should become entitled to financial compensation for NCAA's commercial uses of their image. The NCAA maintains that paying its athletes would be a violation of its concept of amateurism in sports. At stake are "billions of dollars in television revenues and licensing fees."
The University of North Carolina academic-athletic scandal involved alleged fraud and academic dishonesty committed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Following a lesser scandal that began in 2010 involving academic fraud and improper benefits with the university's football program, two hundred questionable classes offered by the university's African and Afro-American Studies department came to light. As a result, the university was placed on probation by its accrediting agency.
The definition of amateurism within the context of collegiate sports has evolved since it was first pronounced by the NCAA upon its inception in 1906. In its early stages, changes in the NCAA's core beliefs in what a student-athlete should be rewarded and allowed to accept financially for their athletic talents had its effects on the definition of amateurism. Over the course of the 20th and early 21st century, regulatory changes, court claims, and the beliefs of NCAA authority about student-athlete compensation further developed what an amateur collegiate athlete is entitled to receive. This evolution is what impacted the evolving logistics of the NCAA Bylaw 12, which explains the current definition of amateurism and what it grants or restricts a collegiate athlete to be able to receive as compensation for their participation. These guidelines have been described to both benefit and unjustifiably limit the student-athlete and the success of institutions’ athletic performance. This debate has been a strong driver in court claims against the NCAA and the mainstream controversy about what student-athletes should have the right to receive financially.
One & Done is a documentary film about Australian basketball player Ben Simmons and his journey from high school to being selected as the number one pick in the 2016 NBA draft. In the film Simmons is critical of the NCAA and how it treats its athletes and how it looks down on so-called "one and done" athletes. The film premiered on Showtime on November 4, 2016.
National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, 594 U.S. ___ (2021), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the compensation of collegiate athletes within the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It followed from a previous case, O'Bannon v. NCAA, in which it was found that the NCAA was profiting from the namesake and likenesses of college athletes. The case dealt with the NCAA's restrictions on providing college athletes with non-cash compensation for academic-related purposes, such as computers and internships, which the NCAA maintained was to prevent the appearance that the student athletes were being paid to play or treated as professional athletes. Lower courts had ruled that these restrictions were in violation of antitrust law, which the Supreme Court affirmed in a unanimous ruling in June 2021.
In college athletics in the United States, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has historically resisted efforts to compensate college athletes. However, after years of effort by those in favor of student-athlete compensation, culminating in the Supreme Court's decision in NCAA v. Alston (2021), college athletes may now earn compensation for their name, image, and likeness (NIL).
