Women’s College Sports Was Growing. Then the NCAA Took Over

Great Game Lab co-director Victoria Jackson spoke with the Wall Street Journal’s Laine Higgins about the women’s college sports body, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, that operated in the 1970s and into the early 1980s. The AIAW was run by women for women, and tried to develop a philosophy and approach to competitive, elite sports distinctive from the men’s college sports body, the NCAA. The end of the AIAW and the launching of women’s championships and governance within the NCAA marked a loss of women’s control of women’s college sports, and policy designed primarily for women’s sports. This story of men’s teams and leagues launching women’s divisions and often displacing women’s sports bodies created by and for women is seen throughout the world, and everyone who works in women’s sports experiences the tension between stand-alone women’s teams and leagues and women’s sides and divisions within formerly men’s-only sports bodies.