American College Baseball Association

The American College Baseball Association was the first collegiate baseball organization in the world. It was founded on December 6, 1879 in Springfield, MA and comprised six schools: Harvard University, Yale University, Amherst College, Dartmouth College and Brown University. They voted to exclude any professional players from their games, but at that time their teams were not solely constituted of student-athletes. Yale, the strongest of the teams, withdrew before the inaugural season the following spring in order to play its own schedule mainly against professional teams, allowing Princeton to win the inaugural championship; Yale returned in 1881. At the time, college sports were still run by students and were independent of the institutions which they attended, something which would gradually change over the following two decades.

The group was still a going concern in 1893, with Harvard, Dartmouth, Amherst and Williams College the remaining members. With the development of other collegiate team sports, the group was eventually replaced by the concept of collegiate conferences active across various sports, organized under the auspices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, with most of the members of the American College Baseball Association joining the Ivy League.

The name is still used to this day by an informal grouping of college baseball programs withing the NCAA framework that works to unify regulations on such issues as dates of the college baseball season and so forth.