The NCAA has terrific stories to tell. We have many thousands of outstanding young people who achieve excellence in competition and in class, many hundreds of great coaches who teach and inspire their student-athletes, and many hundreds more committed athletics administrators who facilitate success through policy, programming and personal support.

Their stories need to be told, and we are here to tell them.

So often these wonderful tales get buried because they are juxtaposed against an unfortunate anomaly that attracts all the attention and publicity. While I understand readers’ attraction to the sometimes lurid stories, it nonetheless is unfair to those who make up the vast majority of intercollegiate athletics.

We want to tell their stories better.

We are proud of people who make up intercollegiate athletics – we are pleased about who they are and what they do. We do not want that to be lost.

Such recognition and awareness of our people may be well understood locally on a particular campus – which is good – but it needs to be better. We are attempting to rectify that in a small way by shining the light from under the bushel on these great people and their stories.

As I enter my sixth year as NCAA president, one of the things I have come to appreciate more and more is the multitude of excellent people who work so hard on behalf of student-athletes and intercollegiate athletics. This lack of knowledge, I expect, came from the fact that they were not being publicized enough – no one was telling their stories.

Now I better understand how important it is that their stories be told, and that is what this publication is all about.

Champion is a magazine you will need to read – but you will want to read it more because it tells the stories of the people who make up the Association.

America is the only country in which higher education and athletics are so intricately linked. Such a unique relationship – one that has lasted more than a century – is possible only because of the people who make it work.

We are their champion.

– Myles Brand,
NCAA President