Edgar Sherman, a former NCAA secretary-treasurer and an instrumental figure during the early 1970s in the creation of the Association’s three membership divisions, died Tuesday. He was 97.

Sherman, a highly successful football coach at Muskingum who also served as athletics director during 22 years at the school, was active in NCAA governance from 1967 to 1979.

He served as secretary-treasurer, an elected Association-wide officer’s position, during 1977 and 1978 and also chaired the 1973 Special Committee on Restructuring that proposed the creation of Divisions I, II and III.

Sherman was described as a “quiet but effective” leader of the Association in a feature published in The NCAA News in 1992.

“I don’t believe he has ever gotten the appropriate credit for guiding the NCAA into the direction it continues to go,” Louis Spry, then an NCAA associate executive director, said in the article. “Many of the accepted ways of doing things today are, in a large part, because of Ed Sherman.”

After the NCAA membership’s rejection in early 1973 of a plan that would have established two divisions – one for “major” football and basketball schools and another for all other NCAA members – the Association’s leadership formed a special committee to propose another model to consider later in the year.

Sherman, who according to a 2007 feature in The NCAA News supported studying restructuring but was sympathetic to smaller schools’ objections to proposals he described as driven by “some discussion by a group of football coaches,” was asked to chair the panel.

The committee recommended creating three divisions and also recommended that schools be given time to choose which division they would join, rather than be assigned membership based of the size of their athletics programs. The committee also proposed requiring joint voting by all NCAA members on constitutional issues, as well as a major expansion of championships opportunities for student-athletes in all three divisions.

The proposals passed easily at the August 1973 Special Convention, and the resulting governance structure remained essentially in place until the NCAA approved greater autonomy for the three divisions and presidential control of governance in the late 1990s.

Sherman, a 1936 Muskingum graduate who became the first Division III football coach to be inducted into the National Football Foundation College Hall of Fame, also chaired the NCAA College Division Football Playoffs Committee. That committee led efforts to replace the regional football bowl games that were then played in the College Division with a national championship.

He also chaired the Division III Football Committee for two years after the 1973 restructuring.

Sherman is survived by his wife, Marge Marstellar Sherman, and three children.