Following is the full text of NCAA President Cedric W. Dempsey's State of the Association address during the January 13 opening business session at the 2002 NCAA Convention. Because the opening business session also included remarks from keynote speaker Condoleezza Rice, however, Dempsey delivered a shorter version of the following speech.

Thank you and good afternoon.

It was a day I'll never forget. I was giving a speech in Atlanta. Near the end of my comments, I looked up and in the back of the room saw a staff member with a concerned look on his face. When I left the stage, I made my way back to him and asked if something was wrong. His answer was: "Yes, Ced, something is very wrong."

It was September 11, 2001, and our world was changing.

September 11, of course, is one of those days all of us will always remember where we were and what we were doing. And, like me, you'll never forget.

September 11 was one of those moments when good and evil locked in battle -- and we immediately understood that good would triumph, as it always does.

By mid-morning of that day, we began to identify the heroes we have celebrated often in the last four months -- the firefighters, the police officers, the emergency workers. Ordinary Americans doing the job they do every day, but doing so under extraordinary circumstances.

We saw other heroes emerge everywhere. We saw a young man help an elderly woman find her husband, whom she knew had been close to Ground Zero. We heard about teams of student-athletes going as a group to give blood because they knew it would be needed.

We read about the heroes aboard United Flight 93 -- some of them former student-athletes -- who rose up against the terrorists and sacrificed themselves so that the plane would not be flown into a second tragedy in our nation's capital.

In the November 19 edition of The NCAA News, we told the story of some former student-athletes who lost their lives that day. One was Michael Weinberg, a former baseball standout at St. John's University (New York). Michael was a New York City firefighter who wasn't supposed to be working on September 11. He had a day off and was supposed to be playing golf. But when he heard the news, he threw his clubs into the back of his SUV and raced to lower Manhattan. Michael stopped at his station house to pick up Father Mychal Judge, a fire chaplain, and they rushed to the scene. Michael was killed and his family believes that Father Judge was administering last rites to Michael when they both were hit by falling debris. They were among the thousands who lost their lives that day.

Julie Geis, a former softball star at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and senior vice-president of a Kansas City business firm, was on the 105th floor of the South Tower at the World Trade Center when it was struck. Although she perished in the attack, her commitment to helping others lives on in Kansas City. An active volunteer, Julie was president of an organization called "Women with One Voice," a nonprofit group that assists women and their families in need of medical services, health care and educational assistance.

Todd Beamer, another former baseball student-athlete at Wheaton College (Illinois), was on United Flight 93. Now we know of the heroic actions Todd and some fellow passengers took. Flight 93 will forever be a symbol of those who refuse to let evil have its way. In fact, it was Todd's last words into his cell phone that President Bush recently cited as a rallying cry for America. Todd said: "Are you guys ready? Let's roll."

Through all the numbing disbelief of September 11, we have seen America, Americans and the free world rally behind a nation and a president determined to fight back, determined to overcome adversity the likes of which we have not seen for generations in this country.

Since that day, each of us has looked within ourselves for values, principles and character to sustain the war effort that we know will go on for some time. Those of us fortunate enough to have been involved in athletics have much to draw from, and September 11 reminded us to protect those values, not only for our own needs, but for those of future generations.

Tonight we will honor 15 very special individuals at the NCAA Honors Dinner. We will celebrate the accomplishments of Today's Top VIII, the six Silver Anniversary Award winners and the winner of the Theodore Roosevelt Award. These 15 individuals truly represent the great promise of intercollegiate athletics. For the Teddy winner and the Silver Anniversary winners, it is the promise fulfilled -- that intercollegiate athletics can produce greatness on the field and in society as a whole. For Today's Top VIII, it is the promise for tomorrow. Here is where leaders are made.

We visited recently with three of the Silver Anniversary winners to ask them about the values they took from their days as student-athletes, how those values helped them develop professionally and personally over the last 25 years, and how they helped sustain these remarkable individuals in the days following September 11.

Richard Chapman is the president and CEO of Clark Bardes Consulting, the world's largest compensation and benefits consulting firm. He was a basketball standout and Academic All-American when he led Augustana College (South Dakota) to the NCAA Division II tournament in 1977. He lost both friends and business associates in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Rich talks about learning to bounce back from adversity.

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"When I was an athlete, virtually on a daily basis there were things to bounce back from. Something as small as a bad practice or a poor game -- even a bad season, it was necessary to have a positive attitude, to dig a little deeper, come back and correct things that were wrong, perhaps, or even events that happened outside of my control. I find that in our business setting, those are issues that we deal with every day. It could be a reversal on an economic trend that is outside of our control. It could be business issues in which we make mistakes we need to correct. But we need to bounce back, we need to overcome, we need to have a positive attitude so that we can move on to the next level, to a new plateau of success in our business environment."

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Betsy King, the first player in the Ladies Professional Golf Association to reach the $6 million career-earnings mark, was inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame in 1996. She also was a three-year letter-winner in basketball at Furman University and helped lead the school to an AIAW golf championship in 1976. Betsy talks about the need for discipline to help bring balance to our lives. She sees September 11 as a loss of innocence.

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"I think one of the things that collegiate sports taught me was discipline, because it was tough to be a student-athlete. You really had to learn how to balance your time, make good use of your time, and have the discipline to study as well as to practice your particular sport. And certainly what's helped me, I think, on the LPGA tour, is to be disciplined because there are a lot of things that you have to do besides just play golf, and the organization, the discipline that I learned in college was very helpful."

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Rodney Slater was Secretary of Transportation under President Clinton and was the first African-American to head the Federal Highway Administration. At Eastern Michigan University, he was a three-year letter-winner in football. For Rod, athletics represented family, and he has carried that sense of family throughout his career. Now a lawyer in Washington, D.C., Rod also lost friends and colleagues in the World Trade Center attacks.

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"Well, for me, moving away from a small town in Arkansas to eastern Michigan, with the student population five times larger than my hometown population, I felt a bit like someone going to a distant land. But the football team, and then later the forensics team and the entire university 'family,' as I refer to it, became my extended family. You receive the kind of love that encourages you to do your best, that encourages you to stay focused and to muster the resolve necessary to not only win on the athletics field but to win in life. And that spirit has been with me across the years -- all of the friendships and the love enjoyed and the experiences that I will cherish for a lifetime."

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Perseverance, discipline, family. Those are values with which each of us can identify.

It seems to me that the critical lesson for us to take from these commentaries is the importance of the student-athlete experience. We spend so much time and energy in the governance of intercollegiate athletics over recruiting advantages and disadvantages, over competitive equity and level playing field, and over marketing to maximize our revenues. But if addressing those issues is all we believe our mission is, we are selling ourselves and our student-athletes far short.

Among the many lessons created by the September 11 attacks is the very real one that we will defeat evil by the efforts -- heroic, extraordinary or common -- of people bolstered by values that sustain them through their darkest hours. I believe that intercollegiate athletics has been and will continue to be a significant way to impart those values.

The educational experience of the student-athlete -- in the classroom and on the field or court -- is paramount. Our primary mission is to educate so that we produce "the right stuff" in those who will lead us tomorrow. We have to instill the values of perseverance, discipline and family so that the next generation is prepared for whatever may come.

It would be easy to go from here today, imbued in the rhetoric of values, to leave the Honors Dinner tonight, inspired with the achievements of the best and brightest, and to return tomorrow to a version of business-as-usual that fails to apply these lessons to our real world.

I encourage you not to do so.

Our publics believe us when we say our priority should be the support of student-athletes, but they also believe that we are paying more attention to making money than educating young people. We know that because we've done the research. The media, the general public and even those of us involved in the administration of college sports all have said that the NCAA and intercollegiate athletics give real service to raising revenues and lip service to supporting the best interests of student-athletes.

That is a significant part of our reputation today, and if we are going to change that reputation, we're going to have to change what business-as-usual looks like.

Earlier this year, the Knight Commission issued its report after months of interviews and discussion. I was a member of that commission, and there are portions of the report I agree with and portions I certainly don't. I've publicly said that I think it painted with too broad and too dark a brush. I know many of you feel the same way, and we could debate the findings and recommendations all day.

But there are two undeniable facts that emerge from the report. First, there are significant portions of those publics we rely on for support and who have put their trust in us to conduct intercollegiate athletics in accordance with the values we espouse. These publics believe we are failing in that effort.

In other words, there are "trust gaps" between those who run intercollegiate athletics and the media, the public, the faculty at our own institutions, and the student-athletes who participate in college sports. While our "approval rating" (to borrow a term from politics) within each of our communities is probably high, the collective perception of college sports should be of concern to us.

The second undeniable fact that came out of the Knight Commission report is that we must find "the will to act." We cannot afford to indulge our local self-interest while we continue to damage the reputation of college sports as a whole. If we are to regain the public's confidence that we live by the values we speak, we will have to overcome our instincts for more wins, more money, more control and more power when those instincts interfere with the mission of the academies to which we owe our allegiance. That is a challenge for an enterprise driven by competitive impulse. But I believe we can do it. And indeed we must do it.

If I could create a roadmap for the reform in intercollegiate athletics that many in the last year have called for, I would create an environment in which we measure every proposed legislation or policy change against the values we say are important. That's the real test of how we honor values. How do we put them to use every day, good times and bad, on the field or off, even when no one is looking?

I like the models for organizational behavior that Divisions II and III have established through their strategic planning process, which aligns decision making with values. The governance bodies within each of those divisions recognized four years ago that they needed a new model for directing what I have today called "business as usual." They recognized the need to reaffirm the values they already had in their philosophy statements, create specific goals based on issues confronting each division, and then filter proposed legislation through those values and goals.

The role of the Management and Presidents Councils in those divisions is to set the agenda, focus proposed legislation toward the goals and values and then hold the membership accountable for aligning decisions with values.

A year ago, I commended Division II for the work it had done with regard to redefining amateurism. To focus on that very thorny issue, the Management and Presidents Councils made amateurism one of the division's 10 goals in 1998. A committee had worked through the problem, examined the issue under the light of the Division II philosophy statement and put a set of proposals before the membership that represented the first real change in amateurism since athletics were brought to America.

Division III has a set of proposals on amateurism to consider this year. The proposals are somewhat different from those approved last year by Division II because the operating philosophies of the two divisions are different. And that, of course, is as it should be. Both, however, embrace student-athlete welfare in ways that are meaningful and that align business-as-usual with values.

I encourage Division III to approve Proposal Nos. 41 through 45 that make up the amateurism deregulation package. I also encourage Division III to continue on a path to establish financial aid audits by peer groups. This will assure compliance with the fundamental principle that excludes athletics ability from consideration when determining financial assistance. This is an important example to Division III of how we must hold ourselves accountable for the values we embrace.

Division II is once again breaking new ground with its efforts to better define the role and duties of the senior woman administrator position. We look forward to reviewing the results of that effort.

Division I is at the front end of its strategic planning process, but the job is well underway. A task force of the Board of Directors was created in August to focus on issues of academic and fiscal integrity. That group is guiding a baseline study of economic and other factors that drive the behavior of Division I member institutions and participating student-athletes. It also is re-examining the vision, mission and guiding principles for Division I to help develop the division's strategic plan.

Another group in Division I that is focusing on how to align business-as-usual with values is the Football Study Oversight Committee. It also is a presidential-driven body that is examining a broad range of issues around Division I football.

A third group in Division I is taking a look at academic integrity issues and developing proposals for an integrated set of initial- and continuing-eligibility standards. They seek standards that will redefine academic progress so that graduation rates are improved and Division I can deliver on the promise to educate the student-athletes it recruits. The Division I members will hear reports from all three of those groups tomorrow in the forum.

Much work remains to be done in Division I. We can't let up in our efforts to increase ethnic and gender diversity among head coaches and administrators, to comply with Title IX, to assure that the integrity of athletics programs and higher education is not impaired by outside influences, to reduce the time demands on student-athletes. But the will to act appears to be at the forefront in the work of the task force. As Kent State University President Carol Cartwright -- a member of the Division I Board and task force -- put it: "we need to create a reputation for the Board so that no one would dare bring us a proposal that doesn't match up with our values."

The reputation of intercollegiate athletics must continue to be based on values. And devotion to education, the primacy of the student-athlete, and the expectation for fair, equitable and sportsmanlike competition must be paramount among those values. We must embrace value-based decision-making as our new business model.

To help guide us, we cannot forget the lessons of the last 120 days.

After his death, Todd Beamer's wife found a folded piece of paper in her husband's den. It was important to Todd and it should be important to us. Todd had saved a passage from a speech Theodore Roosevelt gave in 1910, entitled: Citizenship in a Republic. The passage reads: "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who strives valiantly, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in worthy causes. Who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement and who, at worst, if he fails, fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Today -- as it has always been -- our challenge is clear. Athletics must teach. We must use these games not simply as a contest but as a classroom for life -- to strive, to try, and to live for much more than the transitory win or loss.

An enormous price was paid September 11 for the reminder that this nation has its roots in values. We guard against another September 11 by living and protecting those values -- never taking them for granted -- always remembering the sacrifices that come with such action.

Finally, we must remember that each of us has a role to play in teaching the next generation that values are the foundation of our society and ultimately of our lives.

None of us can ever forget.

As we rebuild and restore our nation and ourselves, we cannot and must not forget. The values we fight to preserve, the examples we set with our lives, and the contributions we make to our communities form the bedrock of this great nation.