Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special
English. I'm Steve Ember. And I'm Faith Lapidus. This week on our program, we tell about the
largest college sports organization in the United States. The National
Collegiate Athletic Association includes colleges and universities, athletic
conferences and non-profit organizations. It has over one thousand members. The
NCAA sets rules for student athletes and their schools.
It links academic studies, sports, rules and
big business. But most Americans think about one thing when they hear NCAA:
championships.
This month, many Americans are caught up in
the yearly tradition of “March Madness.” It describes the excitement over the
Men’s and Women’s NCAA National Basketball Championships. The first games began
March sixteenth. People join “office pools” in work places around the country —
usually to bet on the men’s championship. Fans in office pools try to predict the
winners of each of the sixty-three games and the college basketball champion.
They fill out forms called brackets with their choices of which team they think
will win. Usually, people bet five or ten dollars. Quang Lam, a Web producer
from Virginia, says he is in three pools this year: two for money and one for
fun. First prize in one pool is one thousand dollars. Fans used to fill in
their brackets on paper. Today, office pools are mostly done on-line. People
bet tens of millions of dollars on NCAA tournament games in Las Vegas, Nevada,
where gambling is legal. But Americans bet much more in office pools
nationwide.
Everyone in office pools wants to pick the
Final Four. Those are the last four winning teams remaining from a field of
sixty-five in the men’s competition. This year’s NCAA Men’s Final Four
competition takes place in Indianapolis, Indiana starting April third. The top
women’s teams play in San Antonio, Texas beginning April fourth. There are always surprises during March
Madness. This year’s top men’s team, the University of Kansas, lost in the
second round to ninth seeded Northern Iowa University. But evenly matched teams
often play to exciting finishes like Michigan State University’s last second
victory over the University of Maryland.
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In some ways, the NCAA really is about
championships. The first was held in nineteen twenty-one. Sixty-two teams
competed in the National Collegiate Track and Field Championship held at the
University of Chicago. Today, the NCAA holds eighty-eight championships in
twenty-three sports every year. Since nineteen seventy-three, colleges and
universities have competed in three divisions. The largest schools compete in
Division One.
This year, the NCAA is marking its one
hundred fourth year. But it is only the twenty-ninth year that women’s
championships have been part of NCAA sports. Before the early nineteen seventies, women
did compete in sports clubs at America’s colleges and universities. But these
activities were not organized as they are now. Women’s competitions were
organized through health associations or other groups. And they received little
attention compared to men’s sports.
But in nineteen seventy-two, Congress passed
the federal law known as Title Nine. It bars discrimination based on sex at
educational institutions that receive federal money. Title Nine changed college
sports forever. Joni Comstock is a top official for championships with the
NCAA. JONI COMSTOCK: “Women’s programs began to
ramp up and get more support and resources and attention post nineteen
seventy-two. And by nineteen eighty-one men’s and women’s programs were joined
together under the umbrella of the NCAA.”
More than four hundred thousand students take
part in sports organized by the NCAA. Women and men still do not take part in
athletics in equal numbers. But Joni Comstock says NCAA women’s participation
has grown a lot. JONI COMSTOCK: “In nineteen eighty-one, we
had approximately sixty-four thousand women who are participating in NCAA
intercollegiate athletics across this country. And today we have approximately
a hundred and seventy-seven thousand female participants in our NCAA
institutions.”
College teams may have both men and women in
three sports: skiing, rifle shooting and fencing. Only in rifle do women
compete directly against men. This year’s champion was Texas Christian
University. In rifle, women competitors are so strong that TCU became the first
all-female team to win the NCAA championship. As senior vice-president for championships,
Joni Comstock knows how hard it is to coordinate big sports events. She says
the NCAA spends about seventy million dollars a year to organize championships.
Fifty-seven thousand student-athletes take part. Joni Comstock says
championships are held in rounds at different places around the country.
JONI COMSTOCK: “If you take the eighty-eight
championships and then you count each of the rounds within those championships
and then all of the sites, we run seven hundred and fifty-six events all over
the country.” The NCAA has more than three hundred eighty
professional employees working mainly at its headquarters in Indianapolis,
Indiana.
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The Men’s and Women’s Final Four basketball
championship receives a lot of attention at NCAA headquarters. But they are not
even the last of the winter season championships. The division one hockey
championship, called the Men’s Frozen Four, finishes on April tenth. Still, it is hard to overstate the importance
of the men’s and women’s division one basketball championships to the NCAA. The
University of Oregon won the first men’s tournament in nineteen thirty-nine.
That event was held at Northwestern University near Chicago. It lost money.
Today, money is not a problem. The NCAA has a
contract with CBS Television to broadcast the men’s tournament. It is worth
about six hundred seventeen million dollars this year. A contract with ESPN is
worth seventy-three million dollars over the next four years. It includes
broadcasting rights for the women’s championship games. Television and marketing money from these
events make up about eighty-five percent of the NCAA’s income. Much of that,
however, is returned to the colleges and universities. Sixty percent of the
NCAA’s expenses are payments to its division one schools.
People have criticized the NCAA for placing
too much importance on the business side of college sports. Education Secretary
Arne Duncan recently urged banning teams with low graduation rates from play in
the NCAA basketball tournament.Some men’s basketball teams have graduation
rates well below forty percent. But the NCAA says that graduation rates among
all student athletes are higher than the general student population. Joni Comstock says the NCAA does a lot of
research on the effect of sports on student-athletes. She says ninety percent
of student-athletes say they believe they have developed strong skills of
leadership and teamwork. And over ninety percent of college athletes say their
experience has helped them in their current jobs.
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The roots of the NCAA date back to the need
to control one sport—American football. In fact, a former NCAA worker Kay Hawes
wrote that the NCAA’s “father was football and its mother was higher
education.” In the early nineteen hundreds, football was wildly popular. The
sport had fewer rules, was extremely violent and provided little protection for
players. Serious injuries and deaths were common. In nineteen-oh-five, President Theodore
Roosevelt called together representatives from Harvard, Princeton and Yale
universities. His idea was to change the rules of football to make it safer.
The message was that the game must be reformed or it would be banned.
Sixty-four colleges and universities gathered
to create a new rule-making group that year. It was called the Intercollegiate
Athletic Association of the United States. In nineteen-oh-nine, it renamed
itself the National Collegiate Athletic Association. But the NCAA does not hold
a football championship for the biggest universities, although it does for
division two and three schools. The Bowl Championship Series is managed by
officials of major athletic conferences, bowl game representatives and a few
schools. It is not linked to the NCAA and divides its own income of one hundred
forty-eight million dollars separately.
In over a century, the NCAA has struggled
with the same issues that it faces today. They are questions of sportsmanship,
pay for players and influence from sports agents. Academic requirements and
rules limiting the time students spend on sports are also subjects for reform
and debate. But the NCAA has built a tradition of sports
competition. It has taught hundreds of thousands of talented young people about
teamwork and leadership. Sports and teaching have a long history together.
Our program was written and produced by Mario
Ritter. I’m Faith Lapidus. And I’m Steve Ember. Join us again next week for
THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.
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