The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) is consulting Japanese authorities on the formation of an NCAA-style governing body for college sports in Japan.
Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, traveled to Tokyo to discus with government officials, sports industry leaders and at least 20 university presidents about Japan’s desire to form its own collegiate athletics association. Japanese colleges are considering modeling their new system after one that has served as the regulatory body in the United States for more than a century. If successful, Japan would become one of the few countries outside the United States to establish an NCAA-type governing body for college athletics.
Already, eight Japanese universities, which currently compete on a club sports model, have begun accepting government funding to shore up their athletic departments.
“The NCAA, a multibillion-dollar organization alternately respected and ridiculed for its stewardship of college sports in the United States, has found a prominent new international admirer: Japan,” reads a New York Times Commentary, with Emmert describing his visit as “exploratory” and driven mostly by what he hears from American university leaders looking to bolster their international standing. “We don’t have any grand design to spread the NCAA into some global enterprise,” Emmert is quoted as saying.
To read more, click: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/sports/ncaa-japan
This story first appeared in the blog, The Sport Intern. The editor is Karl-Heinz Huba of Lorsch, Germany. He can be reached at ISMG@aol.com. The article is reprinted here with permission of Huba.