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'College athletics' refers primarily to sports and games organized and sanctioned by institutions of tertiary education (colleges or universities in American English). In the United States, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics regulate most college sports.
Competition between student clubs from different colleges, not organized by and therefore not representing the institutions or their faculties, may also be called "intercollegiate" athletics or simply college sports.
College sports originated as student activities.
In the United States today, many college sports are extremely popular on both regional and national scales, in many cases competing with professional championships for prime broadcast and print coverage. So-called Interuniversity Sport has a lower profile in Canada, and in most of the rest of the world the equivalent level of competition is not followed so closely. Still, the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is an immensely popular spectator sport.

Contents

Early Clubs

Modern Controversy

Facts About NCAA student athletes

Early Clubs

The first intercollegiate sporting event in the U.S. took place in 1852, twenty-three years after the first Oxford-Cambridge boat race, when several rowing clubs from Yale and Harvard matched up at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Baseball teams from Amherst College and Williams College in Western Massachusetts played the earliest known intercollegiate game in 1859. The Fordham Rose Hill Baseball Club of St. John's College in New York (now Fordham University) played the first ever nine-man team college baseball game (known as "New York Rules" and more closely resembling the modern game) on November 3, 1859 against (the now defunct) St. Francis Xavier College. The first intercollegiate soccer match in the U.S. took place on November 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, N.J., when clubs from Princeton and Rutgers played under rules modified from those of Association Football. The first intercollegiate football game took place on May 15, 1874, at Cambridge, Massachusetts when Harvard played rugby against McGill University of Montreal, Canada.
President Theodore Roosevelt summoned college athletics leaders to two White House conferences to encourage such reforms. In early December 1905, Chancellor Henry M. MacCracken of New York University convened a meeting of 13 institutions to initiate changes in football-playing rules. At a subsequent meeting December 28 in New York City, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) was founded by 62 members.
The IAAUS officially was constituted March 31, 1906, and took its present name, the NCAA, in 1910. For several years, the NCAA was a discussion group and rules-making body; but in 1921, the first NCAA national championship was held: the National Collegiate Track and Field Championships. Gradually, more rules committees were formed and more championships were held.

Modern Controversy

Modern College athletes have a number of controversies which surround them.
1. Some college athletes are admitted despite having lower grades and admissions scores than the average student or than the ostensible minimum permitted for admission. This is more likely the case with Division I men's basketball and football players.

2. College athletes are said to take courses lacking in academic rigor more often than the average student, and some schools offer courses that are de facto athletics courses; similarly, schools may devise particular substandard majors and degrees for athletes.
3. College athletes often take light schedules, stretching their fulfillment of academic requirements over more than four years. In some cases this may require waivers of time limits on graduation.
4. Some athletes receive gifts or payment from booster clubs, or have relatives given salaried positions. Most schools also permit players to be compensated with waived or discounted tuition or by the payment of non-need-based scholarships.
5. Many scandals have arisen through point shaving and having non-athletes take exams or write academic papers for athletes. A number of schools fund tutors who manage individual athletes' schedules and assist them with their academic work.
6. Some schools (e.g.,University of Southern California) have been accused of giving athletes preferential treatment when punishing them for illegal behavior.
7. Some schools permit their athletes to eat in specialized dining halls and live in specialized dormitories dedicated exclusively to athletes, or even to particular teams. This treatment tends to characterize the athletes as professional entertainers hired to represent the university rather than as students who participate in an extracurricular activity.
8. That the athletes are not paid while many college sports generate millions of dollars in profits.Although the NCAA averages better than half a billion dollars a year in revenue it is not allowed. In recent article of the USATODAY Given those numbers, why aren't athletes in revenue-generating sports such as men's basketball and college football paid? Athletes see what's in it for everybody else. They see their jersey numbers on the racks of the campus bookstore, but they don't see any share of the profit. They see their coaches drawing million-dollar salaries and their schools and conferences taking cash from corporate sponsors, but they don't get a whiff of the action.
9. "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." This has caused much controversy over the amount of scholarships available towards male athletics. Title IX forces collegiate programs to offer the same amount of scholarship money for both female and males. However, the number of male participants (mainly due to the size of a football squad) outnumbers the females. This has restricted the amount of male scholarships in other sports.

Facts About NCAA student athletes

★ NCAA By law 17.1.6.1 sets a 20 hour per week limit on time spent on athletics for Division I athletes; however,in a 2006 University of Nebraska study, done in cooperation with the NCAA, it was reported "coaches do not follow the rules of hours of week for practicing."

★ In the same study, 60% of the student-athletes surveyed reported they view themselves "more as athletes than students."

★ The study also reports, "many individuals with whom student-athletes come in contact with view them more as athletes than as students."