Former Olympian Donna de Varona will be honored as the 36th recipient of the NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Award during the Honors Dinner on Sunday, January 12, at the NCAA Convention in Anaheim, California.

The Teddy is the highest honor the Association may confer on an individual. It is presented each year to a distinguished citizen of national reputation and outstanding accomplishment.

De Varona will be honored, in part, for her service to women's sports. She has worked for change in that arena, even though most of the rewards have come too late for her to benefit directly. Her current task is serving on the Secretary's Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, which regularly grabs headlines as it explores all facets of Title IX, a law for which she lobbied in Congress before it was passed in 1972.

"My passion is to see as many opportunities as possible for as many people as possible, all the way from the grass-roots level to the colleges," she said. "I'm frustrated that there aren't more opportunities for women, and I'm frustrated for the athletes whose programs have been dropped and left them with no recourse. I'm also frustrated that Title IX has been used as an excuse for such cuts."

In 1960, at age 13, she was the youngest member of the U.S. Olympic swim team competing in Rome. Four years later at the Tokyo Olympics, she won two events and later was voted most outstanding female athlete by both major wire services.

After high school, she enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, which had no women's athletics program at the time, the same as virtually every other college. With her sports participation limited to driving recruits from the airport for then-football coach Tommy Prothro and coaching various community and university intramural swim teams, the political science major turned to television sports broadcasting, a field that was in its infancy.

She debuted on Wide World of Sports, covering the 1965 men's AAU swimming championships with Jim McKay. Because of that appearance, de Varona is generally credited as being the first woman on network television in the sports broadcasting field.

Her television career peaked at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, an event for which she also worked as a special consultant to chairman Peter Ueberroth.

De Varona earned her degree in 1986, after completing two lengthy assignments. The first traced the history of amateur sports legislation in the U.S. For background, de Varona drew upon her experience as an appointee to President Ford's Commission on Olympic Sports, as well as her subsequent role as a special consultant to the Senate to document the legislative history of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. That law, which mandated restructuring of U.S. Olympic and amateur sports organizations, was passed during President Carter's administration. The second project documented the history of familiar friend Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and its impact on women's sports.

De Varona made unwanted headlines in April 1998 when she was fired by ABC, allegedly for "failing to appeal to a male demographic of ages 18 to 39." She countered with a $50 million lawsuit alleging age discrimination, a case that was later settled out of court. She ended up back at ABC, where she still works.

The former Olympian's work as chair of the 1999 Women's World Cup Organizing Committee, which culminated in what has been called the most successful women's sporting event ever, put her in the public eye under much happier circumstances. Her marquee moment came after U.S. team member Brandi Chastain's tiebreaking penalty kick, when she walked on the field of the sold-out Rose Bowl, knowing that the game had attracted an unprecedented in-house and worldwide television audience, which, de Varona said, provided as much satisfaction as any gold medal.

De Varona currently splits her time between family, television work and helping to try to solve the Title IX conundrum. The commission is due to complete its report to Department of Education Secretary Rod Paige later this winter.

Her network duties encompass both on- and off-screen responsibilities, though she spends most time off working as a liaison with domestic and international sports organizations for ABC, ESPN and Disney. On New Year's Day, she co-hosted ABC's coverage of the Rose Bowl parade.