Dennis Collins, the only executive director of the North Coast Athletic Conference since its establishment 25 years ago, died Sunday at his home near Cleveland.

Collins, who took pride in the equal emphasis that the conference placed on all men’s and women’s sports from the beginning of his tenure, served on the NCAA Council during the 1990s before federation of the Association. He also helped organize the Division III Commissioners Association, which he served as its third president from 1994 to 1996.

Collins was working as a professional photographer for the Cleveland Browns and the National Football League, and also providing public relations services for various clients, when the fledgling NCAC hired him as one of the first full-time Division III conference administrators in 1984.

The seven schools that initially formed the league agreed they would emphasize gender equity, broad-based athletics participation for men and women with equal emphasis on each sport, and strong presidential leadership as cornerstone principles.

“We set the tone, and within one to five years, it seemed like every conference had women’s athletics and was broad-based,” Collins recently recalled in an NCAA Champion magazine article marking the NCAC’s 25th anniversary.

“If you read the Division III philosophy, that’s what we’re all about.”

Collins also liked to point out that six of the league’s members were among the 39 institutions that banded together in 1906 to found the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, which four years later was renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

“The NCAA has gone on to be a great success, and I think everybody who was a part of the success, naturally, is proud of it, like a parent being proud of a child,” he told The NCAA News in 2005.

As a conference commissioner, Collins was visible throughout his NCAC tenure in NCAA governance. He was serving on the Division III Nominating Committee at the time of his death, and also had served on the Division III Interpretations and Legislation Committee.

In addition to serving on the NCAA Council from 1992 to 1996, he was a member of the Division III Task Force to Review the NCAA Membership Structure, which helped lay the groundwork for federation of the Association.

More recently, he was the chief advocate for a legislative proposal to cap Division III’s membership size. The proposal, which was referred from the 2006 Convention to an Executive Committee task force that studied a possible restructuring of the NCAA into four divisions or reorganization of Division III into subdivisions, was reintroduced at the 2007 Convention. But it was withdrawn after Division III imposed a membership moratorium and adopted proposals to reduce the number of new members accepted annually while holding current members more accountable for meeting membership requirements.

"Our presidents have been interested in advancing and supporting legislation that we feel is important, and so we've been active and sometimes outspoken," he told The NCAA News in 2004, discussing presidential involvement in the league. "I think it's been good to do that, it's been healthy, and I think we've added to the debate in Division III."

Collins served earlier in his career as communications director for the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics and as sports information director at Case Reserve and Otterbein.

The Ohio State journalism graduate is survived by his wife, Jeanne, and three children.