Book Review: Smith, Ronald A. 2011. Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform, Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. 360 pp. $80.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).

Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform serves as the capstone of Ronald A. Smith’s distinguished academic career in sports history that spanned 28 years on the faculty of Penn State University. This rigorous and well-written history chronicles the many attempts to reform college athletics from the very first intercollegiate athletic contest in America—a student run crew meet held on August 3, 1852 between Harvard and Yale on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, (that just “coincidentally” had a sponsor—the Boston to Montreal rail line)—to the April 2010 appointment of Mark Emmert as president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Emmert was only the second former college president to be appointed to this prestigious position (Smith 2011, 1, 235).