The NCAA Honors Committee has selected Sally K. Ride as the 2005 Theodore Roosevelt Award winner.

The award, the highest distinction the NCAA bestows upon an individual, is named after the nation's 26th president, who played a key role in the establishment of the NCAA. The annual honor recognizes a distinguished citizen of national reputation and outstanding accomplishment.

A former NASA astronaut and current professor of space and science at the University of California, San Diego, Ride is the 38th recipient of the Association's "Teddy" award. She will receive the award January 9 during the Honors Dinner at the NCAA Convention in Dallas.

Ride spent one year at Swarthmore College, where she was a three-sport student-athlete in tennis, field hockey and basketball, before transferring to Stanford University. She occupied the No. 1 singles slot as a tennis standout for the Cardinal from 1969 to 1973.

Ride is most well-known as the first American woman in space. She served as a mission specialist aboard Space Shuttle Challenger missions in 1983 and 1984. During those flights, Ride deployed communications satellites, operated a robot arm and conducted experiments in materials, pharmaceuticals and Earth remote-sensing. She was training for a third space assignment at the time of the 1985 Challenger accident. Ride is the only person to serve on accident boards assembled to investigate both the Space Shuttle Challenger catastrophe and the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy.

In addition to completing tenures as NASA's first director of the office of exploration and as the agency's first director of strategic planning, Ride has served as the Ingrid and Joseph Hibben Professor of Space Science, an endowed chair, at UC San Diego, since 1996. She has been a professor of physics at UC San Diego since 1989.

Ride is the founder and chief executive officer of Imaginary Lines, Inc., an educational media company established in 2000 dedicated to creating communities, providing services and developing products and programming for girls and young women interested in math, science and technology. The author of five science books for children, Ride has initiated and currently directs a large Internet-based NASA education project that enables middle-school students to take digital pictures of Earth from a camera aboard the International Space Station.

A former member of the board of directors for the now-defunct NCAA Foundation, Ride was an NCAA Silver Anniversary Award winner in 1998. The National Women's Hall of Fame and Astronaut Hall of Fame selection is a five-time NASA Group Achievement Award winner and a five-time NASA Special Achievement Award recipient. She also was honored with a NASA Leadership Award in 1987.

Ride has served on the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and on the World Resources Institute Global Council since 1993. A fellow of the American Physical Society, Ride is a member of numerous boards of directors and trustees, including the Aerospace Corporation, the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, and the California Institute of Technology.

Ride earned bachelor's degrees in science and English at Stanford in 1973. She also earned her master's in physics and a Ph.D in astrophysics from Stanford in 1975 and 1978, respectively.