What makes intercollegiate athletics great? Colleges and universities do. They provide the framework to enable student-athletes to succeed in athletics competition and in the classroom.

What makes colleges and universities great? People do. Institutions employ highly qualified and experienced faculty and staff who teach students and administer programs, including intercollegiate athletics, that contribute to the educational mission.

What makes the NCAA great? Both higher education and the people who support it. More than 1,000 colleges and universities make up the Association, bolstered by a national office that employs a highly qualified and experienced staff that helps colleges and universities integrate intercollegiate athletics into the overall student-athlete educational experience.

While the NCAA would not exist without student-athletes or the member institutions they attend, the NCAA also would not exist without a highly competent staff to administer intercollegiate athletics and help institutions foster that educational experience for the 360,000 student-athletes who participate.

The national office staff celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago, and the 350 employees housed at the Indianapolis headquarters have come a long way from the handful who opened the national office doors for the first time in Kansas City in 1952. While the early staff grew in numbers over time, its mantra of serving the membership remained steadfast. In the last five years, though, the NCAA Executive Committee, which is to the NCAA as a board of trustees is to a university, has instructed the NCAA president and the national office staff to provide more leadership and guidance in addition to service.

The last five years also has been a time of major change for the NCAA national office. After almost half a century in the Kansas City area, the NCAA relocated its headquarters to Indianapolis in 1999 in a move designed to take advantage of fiscal opportunities, to better position the national office geographically within the membership, to diversify the staff and to bring a renewed focus to the NCAA as the leader in the amateur sports world.

The move created anxiety at first, both within the staff and from within the membership as about two-thirds of the employees in the Kansas City office decided not to relocate. But the 2004 NCAA national office staff is no longer two groups of employees -- those who moved from Kansas City and those who have been hired since. The 2004 national office is one group of leaders operating out of Indianapolis, the contractual home of the headquarters for at least the next 35 years. The relocation is five years behind us, and the single focus ahead of us is squarely on cultivating the student-athlete educational experience through participation in intercollegiate athletics.

The Executive Committee, with the help of the entire NCAA membership, has given the staff a strategic plan to carry out that goal. As president, I have deployed the staff much as a university CEO would arrange his or her personnel to carry out the institutional mission, and I am confident that the national office staff is positioned correctly to support the strategic plan.

The national office structure is aligned similarly to the collegiate model, with the president overseeing vice-presidents of important university functions such as student affairs (governance and membership services), university relations (branding and communications), financial matters (finance and information services) and athletics (championships). In the broadest sense, the NCAA national office structure resembles that of its peers.

As the representative of universities and colleges, the staff must be knowledgeable about campus life. A frequent concern from the membership during the transition from Kansas City, and even before, was that the national office staff was losing touch with "life in the trenches" on campus. If that was true, and I do not know that it was, the simple fact is that most of the new hires in key membership areas -- governance and membership services and championships in particular -- have come directly from campuses. In addition, a good many of the staff who have left those areas in the last five years have gone back to campuses. This blending of knowledge from campuses to the national office and vice versa only serves to benefit the greater Association and unify intercollegiate athletics administrators under a common purpose.

There is no shortage of national office leaders who espouse this goal and who are grounded in campus life. Senior Vice-President Bernard Franklin, who oversees governance and membership, served as president at Virginia Union University, Saint Augustine's College and Livingstone College. Judy Sweet, the Association's senior woman administrator and senior vice-president of championships, was the membership president in 1992 and 1993, and she spent more than two decades in leadership roles at the University of California, San Diego. Jim Isch, the Association's chief financial officer, held positions at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; Montana State University-Bozeman; and Kansas State University.

The three division vice-presidents -- David Berst, Mike Racy and Dan Dutcher -- have a combined tenure of more than 60 years of serving the Association, and all three play key guidance roles for their division constituents. Executive Vice-President Tom Jernstedt and Dennie Poppe, managing director of baseball and football, are synonymous with the successful events they have overseen for three decades -- the Men's Final Four and the Men's College World Series, respectively. General Counsel Elsa Cole, former counsel at the University of Michigan, has steered the Association through increasingly litigious waters since she initiated the NCAA's on-staff counsel position in 1997. Similarly, David Price, vice-president for enforcement services, has applied his previous tenure at the Pacific-10 Conference to staff leadership in one of the Association's key areas.

The staff also has received leadership from members who have come from other walks of life. Greg Shaheen, who was key to the NCAA as a member of the Indiana Sports Corporation for many years, has brought his administrative capabilities in-house. And Dennis Cryder, vice-president for branding and communications, offers expertise he learned from having worked with Major League Baseball's Kansas City Royals.

I mention these staff members with great hesitation, since doing so means there are many excellent senior-level and junior staff I'm leaving out, but their leadership and commitment to the student-athlete deserves recognition.

The national office also employs leadership at the managing director and director level. The many skilled people at those levels serve in key membership liaison roles and provide guidance in the achievement of strategic goals.

The NCAA Executive Committee had it right when it directed the national office staff to add leadership to its service element. The national office staff is capable and seasoned enough to perform that function exceedingly well. The NCAA -- the member institutions, conferences and the national office staff -- has an absolute obligation to make certain that intercollegiate athletics is successfully woven into the fabric of higher education. The national office staff understands that charge.

That collaborative effort, that partnership from institutions and staff committed to achieving the educational mission, is what makes the NCAA -- and intercollegiate athletics -- great.

Myles Brand is president of the NCAA.