Sixty women athletes from 19 different sports from the late nineteenth century to 1991 are included in this source which highlights women's sporting experienced in America. A few of the women are not American, but fall into the category of "influencing" American sports. The work is in there sections. Part 1 is a history of women's sports; the second part contains the biographies, arranged alphabetically. Each entry is about 2 pages with a photograph, some with performances charted, and all with suggestions for further reading. The appendices list Olympic women medallists by sport, awards and championships, and arranges the athletes in the book by sport. Coverage overlaps but does not duplicate "Condon's Great Women Athletes." Recommended for middle and senior high schools.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the governing body for some 400,000 college athletes in the United States. During football's bowl season and basketball's March Madness, the NCAA likes to remind its millions of TV viewers that it represents student athletes: most of its members compete as amateurs and will never go pro. Somehow, that message seems increasingly lost in a sea of multimillion-dollar TV deals, recruitment scandals, back-channel payouts, fan hysteria, player misbehavior both civil and criminal, and the routine bendingÑor floutingÑof college and NCAA rules about player academic eligibility. Far from this madding crowd, the nation's oldest, most prestigious private colleges and universities go about the business of making scholar-athletes from the ranks of their admitted classes, without special recruitment or scholarship money, and demanding and getting the best from them both on the field and in the classroom. Using a model that has changed very little since it was founded in 1954, the Ivy League offers a bracing corrective to the excesses of big-money college sports. In Ivy League Athletes, veteran sportswriter Sal Maiorana follows nine student-athletes from seven Ivy League campuses through the 2011Ð2012 season. Along the way he shows us the qualities of heart, mind, and body that got them there and allow them to prosper on the field and in the classroom. The book includes a foreword by former Harvard and current NFL quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick.

Many books have been written on the evils of commercialism in college sport, and the hypocrisy of payments to athletes from alumni and other sources outside the university. Almost no attention, however, has been given to the way that the National Collegiate Athletic Association has embraced professionalism through its athletic scholarship policy. Because of this gap in the historical record, the NCAA is often cast as an embattled defender of amateurism, rather than as the architect of a nationwide money-laundering scheme. Sack and Staurowsky show that the NCAA formally abandoned amateurism in the 1950s and passed rules in subsequent years that literally transformed scholarship athletes into university employees. In addition, by purposefully fashioning an amateur mythology to mask the reality of this employer-employee relationship, the NCAA has done a disservice to student-athletes and to higher education. A major subtheme is that women, such as those who created the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), opposed this hypocrisy, but lacked the power to sustain an alternative model. After tracing the evolution of college athletes into professional entertainers, and the harmful effects it has caused, the authors propose an alternative approach that places college sport on a firm educational foundation and defend the rights of both male and female college athletes. This is a provocative analysis for anyone interested in college sports in America and its subversion of traditional educational and amateur principles.

A unique new reference work, this encyclopedia presents a social, cultural, and economic history of American sports from hunting, bowling, and skating in the sixteenth century to televised professional sports and the X Games today. Nearly 400 articles examine historical and cultural aspects of leagues, teams, institutions, major competitions, the media and other related industries, as well as legal and social issues, economic factors, ethnic and racial participation, and the growth of institutions and venues. Also included are biographical entries on notable individuals—not just outstanding athletes, but owners and promoters, journalists and broadcasters, and innovators of other kinds—along with in-depth entries on the history of major and minor sports from air racing and archery to wrestling and yachting. A detailed chronology, master bibliography, and directory of institutions, organizations, and governing bodies—plus more than 100 vintage and contemporary photographs—round out the coverage.