The earliest members of the NCAA confronted recruiting violations, gambling questions, student-athlete health and safety, and issues of subsidizing athletes -- much as today's membership tackles the same challenges.

"So much of the focus in those early days reminds me of the focus of the modern era," said Joe Crowley, former president of the University of Nevada, Reno, who is writing a book commemorating the NCAA Centennial. "The Association was started on the basis of an issue of student-athlete health -- kids getting killed playing football -- that's how it all began," he said. "You look at the history over time, and at least in part, it's a story of finding ways of dealing with problems that seem to be inherent in the game and the enterprise of intercollegiate athletics."

The book will highlight the 100-year history of the NCAA, with an emphasis on the past 25 years. It will be distributed to all student-athletes competing in NCAA championships in 2006, as well as to 2006 Convention delegates, various campus and conference officials, and other friends of the Association.

Crowley's work, conceived in theory more than 10 years ago and pursued in earnest for the last six months, will be part of the NCAA Centennial celebration in 2006. Active in NCAA governance for nearly 20 years as a former NCAA membership president -- and the only person to fulfill concurrent terms on the Presidents Commission and NCAA Council -- Crowley said he was around for many of the changes within the Association over the last quarter-century.

"I had in my mind an understanding of what had happened, but having that understanding and doing the research are two entirely separate things," he said. In addition to reading minutes from early NCAA Conventions and publications from other entities that served as watchdogs for intercollegiate athletics, Crowley has conducted interviews with national office staff and used the services of the NCAA library through librarian Ellen Summers. He has relied on current NCAA research staffers Karen Cooper and and Todd Petr, along with former Director of Research Ursula Walsh. He has explored the Internet, trolling for information about the Association, and has paid visits both to Indianapolis for committee meetings and to Dallas for the 2005 Convention to observe the current NCAA structure in action.

For a recent chapter on how litigation and the law have affected the Association, Crowley leaned heavily on NCAA General Counsel Elsa Cole and her staff.

"Like the country in general, the Association, and higher education in general, has been affected by the blizzard of lawsuits we've come to have," he said "The Association has in some ways been shaped by the results of the litigation. It would be hard to adequately cover the last 25 years without talking about lawsuits."

He hopes to interview all four presidents/executive directors of the organization, and has already sat down with Cedric W. Dempsey and Richard D. Schultz. He has read the lengthy Carnegie Report, published in 1929, and various reports issued by other groups such as the American Council on Education and the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Those reports, he said, were mostly critical, but "with a view toward making a helpful recommendation."

Often, Crowley said, the NCAA has been perceived negatively by press and the public.

"One of the things that plagues the Association is that it is a focus of so much criticism," he said. "That's inevitable if you're a regulatory organization. The critical coverage is such that under the rug is swept a whole bunch of information that tells a positive story about the Association. That needs to get out."

Crowley said he hopes the book will tell that story in a way that is easy for readers to understand.

"The biggest challenge, apart from wanting to tell this history as a big story but also as a series of stories that compose the big story, the biggest challenge has been deciding what to focus on. There's just so much. You can't cover it all in 250 pages," he said. "That decision about what to choose evolves."

In the mid-1990s, Crowley first suggested to then-Executive Director Ced Dempsey that a historical update of the Association be prepared.

"So much had happened in the previous 15 or 20 years, and I thought the Association was not having a lot of success in getting its story out, and really ought to try to tell its own story in a kind of modern history," Crowley said. He said Dempsey was agreeable and asked Crowley to pursue the initiative. However, Crowley was then president at Nevada and couldn't take on the project in addition to his full-time job. After he left the position, he again expressed interest in the idea, but the discussions "didn't go anywhere for one reason or another."

Two years ago, Crowley was contacted again and accepted the task, only to be asked to serve as interim president of San Jose State University, which he did for one year.

The delays did not dampen his desire to work on the book or his commitment to the project.

"We couldn't dent the mass media, who would be far more interested -- because it's the nature of the business -- in bad news. Although the communications staff of the Association was doing what I thought was a heroic job, I thought that we needed something more," he said. "I felt like the NCAA story was waiting to be told in an objective but truthful way."