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College athletics refers primarily to sports and games organized and sanctioned by institutions of tertiary education (colleges in American English). In the United States, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics regulate college sports in that sense. Yet competition between student clubs from different colleges, not organized by and therefore not representing the institutions or their faculties, may also be called "intercollegiate" or simply college sport(s). College sports originated as student activities and it is probably reasonable to periodize the history, otherwise organized by region or institution or sport, first according to whether the students or the institutions organized the clubs and the competition. In the United States today, many college sports are popular locally, where they may provide the best quality competition people can see personally, and the same is true of school sports in smaller locales. But some college sports are immensely popular nationally, competing with professional championships for prime broadcast and print coverage, serving fans who attend few or no games but tune in or read about them much as they follow professional games. So-called Interuniversity Sport has a lower profile in Canada. In most of the rest of the world the equivalent level of competition is only followed by competitors and their close friends and families. Still, the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race may be the model and it is immensely popular spectator sport today.
Clubs Yale and Harvard rowing clubs matched up for the first time in 1852, twenty-three years after the first Oxford-Cambridge contest. Baseball teams from Amherst College and Williams College in Western Massachusetts played the earliest known intercollegiate game in 1859. The baseball club at Brown University in Providence may have been founded in 1863. At Harvard College, the class of 1866 introduced New York baseball, essentially the modern game, in Fall 1862. They played among themselves and played against younger class teams before establishing a college club, supporting a team of players from all classes in 1865(?). | ||||||||
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