The NCAA Honors Committee faces a daunting challenge each year: culling the list of worthy nominees to a select few who are recognized as the Today’s Top VIII; the Silver Anniversary Award recipients; and when warranted, the winners of an Inspiration Award or an Award of Valor.

While that isn’t easy, an even tougher task is identifying a single recipient for the Association’s highest honor — the Theodore Roosevelt Award.

Named after the 26th President of the United States who played a prominent role in the Association’s founding in 1906, the “Teddy” has been presented annually since 1957, with the exception of 1988 when a special award was presented to outgoing Executive Director Walter Byers. Past recipients include former U.S. President Ronald Reagan; the late associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Byron “Whizzer” White; and entertainer Bill Cosby. Last year’s recipient was astronaut and professor Sally Ride. The 2006 Teddy winner is Robert K. Kraft, business executive and owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots.

Although most of the recipients of the Teddy have long since moved off the courts and fields and into their chosen careers, the selection process is just as fierce as any athletics competition in which they might have been engaged. Nominations from member institutions are collected online in July and August. Biographies of candidates are forwarded to the eight-person Honors Committee composed of five Management Council representatives and three nationally distinguished citizens.

Generally the group considers about 15 candidates initially, some of whom are holdovers from the previous years’ pool. A Teddy nominee is allowed to remain in contention for three years. After that period, a school may renominate a candidate. A ranking system cuts the number of candidates to five, which is where the real competition begins, as committee members debate who will be the next Teddy.

Given the high profile of the award — and of its recipients — selecting each year’s winner comes, not surprisingly, with a number of challenges and pressures. Current Honors Committee Chair Valerie A. Richardson, associate athletics director and senior woman administrator at Columbia University, said the group takes seriously the responsibility of choosing the winner of the NCAA’s highest award. She said one of the biggest hurdles the committee struggles to overcome each year is the designed “vagueness” of the criteria, which directs that “the honor shall be presented to a distinguished citizen of national reputation and outstanding accomplishment who graduated from an NCAA member institution and also earned a varsity letter or participated in competitive intercollegiate athletics.”

Unlike the other awards for which the committee makes selections, the criteria for the Teddy come with no specific percentages or other guidelines relating to the nominee’s athletics, academic and professional achievements.

“We really delve into the wording of the criteria and look at how the top nominees fit,” said Richardson. “There’s rarely a clear-cut winner.”

In addition to navigating through open-ended criteria, Honors Committee member Susan Hartmann, a professor of history at Ohio State University, said another challenge in the selection process is the diverse backgrounds of candidates the group considers.

“The people who are nominated, and in fact, the people who have won, come from a great variety of areas and achievements. That makes it hard because you are comparing apples and oranges in some ways,” she said.

NCAA President Emeritus Cedric W. Dempsey, who has experienced the selection process both as the Association’s CEO and now as a committee member, confesses to a sensitivity to the history of the award and said maintaining the kind of integrity and success that honors past winners is important. Dempsey described the pool of potential candidates as “tremendous,” and the committee’s consensus is that the pool is wider and deeper than ever when the NCAA’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is factored into the mix.

But Dempsey pointed to the group’s growing concern about the lack of nominations submitted. In fact, in several cases, the committee has identified candidates and asked their alma maters to nominate them.

Richardson admits that the committee doesn’t receive a high volume of applications, and she believes that many deserving individuals go unsubmitted.

Said Richardson, “We encourage institutions at all levels to look back in their histories at people who competed in intercollegiate athletics and who have gone on to very successful careers.”

Committee member Tim Gleason, commissioner of the Ohio Athletic Conference, describes the selection process as “both science and art.” There is a need to rank candidates and use a bit of math, he said, but the art comes into play with the hearty, healthy discussion that moves the group toward selecting a recipient.

There is pressure, he said, to “get it right,” although he admits that once the committee has whittled the list down to the final few, it is difficult to make a wrong choice. According to Gleason, the three national distinguished citizens on the committee serve as an invaluable resource throughout the selection. Dempsey, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Calvin Hill currently fill that role.

“One of the great components of the Honors Committee is the fact that there are people outside the athletics departments who are involved. If we didn’t have them on the committee, we’d be one-dimensional,” said Gleason. “We couldn’t function nearly as efficiently without those people on the committee. In fact, I would feel very uncomfortable if they were not on it.”

While the committee doesn’t anticipate changing its operations in the near future, Gleason thinks something that could be considered down the road is adding a fourth national distinguished citizen. Dempsey also suggested sharpening the criteria — not only in guiding the committee’s work but also to help member institutions keep an eye out for alumni who could be future Teddy contenders.

Challenges and pressures aside, though, the committee stands ready to continue to shoulder its weighty charge.

“The hardest part is narrowing down those final few candidates,” said Gleason. “No one will ever know those who came oh-so-close to receiving the award.

“It’s a shame there’s only one — but then, that’s what makes it such a great award.”