UAA celebrates 10th anniversary
In the 1997 U.S. News & World Report rankings of the 229 best
universities, eight Ivy League schools are listed in the top 30. That should
not be a surprise, given the outstanding academic reputations of Harvard,
Yale, Dartmouth, etc.
What may surprise some is that seven other schools, including Emory, in
the top 30 belong to an NCAA Division III athletic conference known as the
University Athletic Association (UAA). No other athletic conference in the
nation, in any division, comes close to matching the UAA's numbers.
Want more numbers?
Try that the UAA teams have had nearly 200 Academic All-Americans, 39 NCAA
postgraduate scholars, 985 athletic All-Americans, 62 individual national
champions or Players of the Year, 10 national team champions, 91 teams in
the top 10 at the national championships and 90 others in the top 20.
But this fall, the most notable number is 10 as in the 10th anniversary
of the UAA, which began athletic competition in the fall of 1986. Formal
recognition of the anniversary will take place at Washington University
in St. Louis on Oct. 19 in conjunction with the conference cross country
championships.
The locale is fitting considering that Washington is credited as the leader
in forming the UAA. Informal talks began in the early '80s and picked up
speed in fall 1984. The official announcement came on June 25, 1986.
"The thing that distinguishes the UAA is that the member schools chose
to associate with each other on the basis of their institutional academic
profiles rather than athletics or geography," said Dick Rasmussen,
UAA executive secretary.
Indeed, the geographical scope of the UAA spans from Atlanta to St. Louis
(Washington University) to Chicago (University of Chicago) to Cleveland
(Case Western Reserve University) to New York (New York University and University
of Rochester), to Boston (Brandeis University) to Baltimore (Johns Hopkins
University) and Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon University).
"When I rattle off the list of schools for recruits, they're impressed
and realize that we're serious about athletics because of the financial
commitment, particularly in travel expenditures, that Emory has made to
be a part of the UAA," said Chuck Gordon, Emory's director of athletics
and recreation.
From the beginning, the guiding principle of the conference was to put the
student-athlete first and to provide a first-class athletics experience
within the proper context of higher education. Though it was not consciously
planned, the UAA has provided top-rate athletic competition to its member
schools.
"To be in the UAA carries a sense of pride and expectations for a school's
athletics program," said William Fox, Emory vice president for Institutional
Advancement, who served as the Emory delegate during the formation of the
conference. "To be a member of an athletic conference with like institutions
permits our student-athletes to compete with their peers in every sense
of the word."
And Emory has held its own with its peers, winning 15 of a possible 34 conference
titles the last two school years. The Emory women's tennis team has won
all nine UAA team championships to date, a feat matched by only Johns Hopkins
in men's swimming and diving.
"The UAA has become such an important part of our athletics program
that I can scarcely imagine what it was like or would be like without this
association," said Fox.
--John Arenberg
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