Ohio Valley Conference
| Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) |
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|---|---|
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| Established | 1948 |
| Association | NCAA |
| Division | Division I FCS |
| Members | 12 |
| Sports fielded | 18 (8 M, 9 W, 1 coed) |
| Region | Midwest and South |
| Headquarters | Brentwood, Tennessee |
| Commissioner | Beth DeBauche (since 2009) |
| Website | www |
| Locations | |
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The Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) is a collegiate athletic conference which operates in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States. It participates in Division I of the NCAA; the conference's football programs compete in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS; formerly known as Division I-AA), the lower of two levels of Division I football competition. The OVC has 12 members, 9 of which compete in football in the conference.
Primary source :
The Ohio Valley Conference can trace its roots to 1941 when Murray State athletic director Roy Stewart, Eastern Kentucky athletic director Charles "Turkey" Hughes, and Western Kentucky public relations director Kelly Thompson first formulated the idea of establishing a regional athletics conference. The plan was put on hold due to World War II, but it was resurrected after the conclusion of the war. In 1948, the three schools joined with Louisville, Morehead State, and Evansville to form the Ohio Valley Conference. While many collegiate conferences are struggling today with the question of whether their policies and rules should be determined by the athletic departments or by the institutional heads, from the very beginning, the OVC has been run by the presidents of its member schools.
Historically, the OVC was a pioneer in racial desegregation with Morehead State signing the conference's first black athlete, Marshall Banks, in 1958. The rest of the OVC soon followed in Morehead State's wake. Today, the OVC is unique among NCAA Division I conferences in that it includes one historically black university, Tennessee State University, in a conference that otherwise consists of institutions that are not traditionally black. All other HBCUs in NCAA Division I are members of either the MEAC or SWAC, conferences made up entirely of HBCUs.
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