ABSTRACT
The United States has one of the few educational systems in the world that integrates high-level sport into secondary and post-secondary education as a financially well-supported extra-curricular programme in which teams from educational institutions compete against each other on a regular basis, including state championship competition at the secondary level and national championship competition at the post-secondary level. At the college and university level, there are over 2,000 higher education institutions in the United States with such sport programmes, called ‘intercollegiate athletic programs’. While ‘athletics’ is a term used worldwide to describe track and field programmes, in the United States ‘athletics’ is synonymous with ‘sport’.
