National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics

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. History In 1937, James Naismith and local leaders, including George Goldman and Emil Liston, staged the first National College Basketball Tournament at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Missouri, of which Goldman was director, one year before the first National Invitation Tournament and two years before the first NCAA tournament. The goal of the tournament was to establish a forum for small colleges and universities to determine a national basketball champion. The original eight-team tournament expanded to 32 teams in 1938. On March 10, 1940, the National Association for Intercollegiate Basketball (NAIB) was formed in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1952, the NAIB was transformed into the NAIA, and with that came the sponsorship of additional sports such as men's golf, tennis and outdoor track and field. Football in the NAIA was split into two divisions in 1970, based on enrollment (Divisions I and II); it was consolidated back into a single division in 1997. African-American participation The 1948 NAIB national tournament was the first intercollegiate postseason to feature a Black student-athlete, Clarence Walker of Indiana State under coach John Wooden. Wooden had withdrawn from the 1947 tournament because the NAIB would not allow Walker to play.