This new year – the 103rd in the NCAA’s history – will test the resolve of the Association’s membership with several defining challenges.

All three membership divisions will confront in one way or another the pressures of membership growth. They likely will be asked to collaborate in answering whether the Association’s 35-year-old, three-division structure still adequately serves the diverse needs of more than 1,000 institutions with varying missions and levels of commitment to intercollegiate athletics.

The imperative to improve minority hiring for leadership positions in athletics, especially in football, still must be addressed. It is self-evident that the Association would be better served to solve this problem itself rather than discovering remedies from Congress or the nation’s court system.

The biggest challenge, however, may be found in a realm where the Association, especially Division I, already has taken some of the boldest steps in the history of intercollegiate athletics.

The NCAA’s academic reforms – ranging from an increase in high school core courses for entering freshmen to implementation of progress-toward-degree benchmarks to the achievable accountability of the Academic Progress Rate – are unambiguous in their intent. They are pushing us closer to the greatest of our goals: to ensure that student-athletes are empowered to succeed in the classroom and graduate.

A commitment to continuing improvement in academic performance has been forcefully stated by the Association’s presidential leadership, and institutions’ administrators and coaches increasingly are signing on both in word and in deed to achieve the goal.

But this year will test the Association’s resolve. A segment of the Division I membership inevitably will experience sanctions as they struggle to overcome established patterns of academic underperformance. Pressure likely will mount to delay or shift the impact of reform as those penalties have a very real and observable impact on the competitive success of teams.

With all of these issues, forceful arguments will be made against reform. Agents for change must stand strong, always remembering that the ultimate beneficiaries of positive change will be the 380,000 student-athletes who participate each day in intercollegiate athletics.