Student athlete

The term student-athlete was coined by Walter Byers, the first executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It arose in response to a 1957 worker's compensation case filed by Billie Dwade Dennison, the widow of Ray Dennison, who died while playing football for Fort Lewis A&M (since renamed to Fort Lewis College). As Byers writes in his memoir, the word was designed to avoid the "dreaded notion that NCAA athletes could be identified as employees by state industrial commissions and the courts. We crafted the term student-athlete and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations as a mandated substitute for such words as players and athletes." In the mid-19th century, paedagological reformers in the UK, especially in England, such as Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby, emphasised the importance of English schoolboys from the upper and middle classes developing the spirit, the mind, and the body, which was known as Muscular Christianity. Competitive intramural sports were introduced in post-secondary education in the United States in the nineteenth century. The first popular collegiate sport was crew, but American rules football began its reign as the leading collegiate sport in the late 1880s. As interest in football increased, so did injuries incurred in competition.