The Collegiate Nationals is a multisport event for college

College athletics

College athletics refers primarily to sports and athletic competition organized and funded by institutions of tertiary education . In the United States, college athletics is a two-tiered system. The first tier includes the sports that are sanctioned by one of the collegiate sport governing bodies...

 student

Student

A student is a learner, or someone who attends an educational institution. In some nations, the English term is reserved for those who attend university, while a schoolchild under the age of eighteen is called a pupil in English...

s across the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The events air annually on CBS College Sports Network.

The Nationals include competitions in sports not sanctioned by the NCAA. Events are open to accredited students at both four-year and two-year schools.

The telecasts are produced by Echo Entertainment and marketed by Highline Sports on behalf of CBS College Sports.

Sports offered

• Adventure racing
  Adventure racing
  Adventure racing is a combination of two or more endurance disciplines, including orienteering and/or navigation , cross-country running, mountain biking, paddling and climbing and related rope skills...
  
  
• Beach volleyball
  Beach volleyball
  Beach volleyball, or sand volleyball, is an Olympic team sport played by two teams of two players on a sand court divided by a net.Like volleyball, the object of the game is to send the ball over the net in order to ground it on the opponent’s court, and to prevent the same effort by the opponent....
  
  
• Boxing
  Boxing
  Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...
  
  
• Competitive eating
  Competitive eating
  Competitive eating, or speed eating, is a sport in which participants compete against each other to consume large quantities of food in a short time period. Contests are typically less than 15 minutes in length, with the person consuming the most food being declared the winner...
  
  
• Flowboarding
  Flowboarding
  Flowboarding is a late-20th Century alternative boardsport that is an alchemy of board designs, techniques, tricks and culture derived from surfing, bodyboarding, skateboarding, skimboarding, snowboarding and wakeboarding....
  
   (similar to surfing
  Surfing
  Surfing' is a surface water sport in which the surfer rides a surfboard on the crest and face of a wave which is carrying the surfer towards the shore...
  
  )
• Freeskiing
  Freeskiing
  Freeskiing or Newschool skiing involves tricks, jumps, and terrain park features, such as rails, boxes, jibs, or other obstacles. This form of skiing resulted from a combination of the growth in popularity of snowboarding as well as the progression of Freestyle skiing...
  
  
• Kayak
  Kayak
  A kayak is a small, relatively narrow, human-powered boat primarily designed to be manually propelled by means of a double blade paddle.The traditional kayak has a covered deck and one or more cockpits, each seating one paddler...
  
  
• Skiing
  Skiing
  Skiing is a recreational activity using skis as equipment for traveling over snow. Skis are used in conjunction with boots that connect to the ski with use of a binding....
  
  
• Snowboarding
  Snowboarding
  Snowboarding is a sport that involves descending a slope that is covered with snow on a snowboard attached to a rider's feet using a special boot set onto mounted binding. The development of snowboarding was inspired by skateboarding, sledding, surfing and skiing. It was developed in the U.S.A...
  
  
• Ultimate
  Ultimate (sport)
  Ultimate is a sport played with a 175 gram flying disc. The object of the game is to score points by passing the disc to a player in the opposing end zone, similar to an end zone in American football or rugby...
  
  
• Wakeboarding
  Wakeboarding
  Wakeboarding is a surface water sport which involves riding a wakeboard over the surface of a body of water. It was developed from a combination of water skiing, snow boarding and surfing techniques....
  
  
• Weightlifting

In addition, there are film

Film festival

A film festival is an organised, extended presentation of films in one or more movie theaters or screening venues, usually in a single locality. More and more often film festivals show part of their films to the public by adding outdoor movie screenings...

 and music

Music festival

A music festival is a festival oriented towards music that is sometimes presented with a theme such as musical genre, nationality or locality of musicians, or holiday. They are commonly held outdoors, and are often inclusive of other attractions such as food and merchandise vending machines,...

 competitions.

History

The Nationals were launched in 2006. The site of the first event was the Reno

Reno, Nevada

Reno is the county seat of Washoe County, Nevada, United States. The city has a population of about 220,500 and is the most populous Nevada city outside of the Las Vegas metropolitan area...

-Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada of the United States. At a surface elevation of , it is located along the border between California and Nevada, west of Carson City. Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America. Its depth is , making it the USA's second-deepest...

 area in Nevada

Nevada

Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...

. For its second year (2007), the Nationals expanded to include events at Mission Bay in San Diego, California

San Diego, California

San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...

.

There were more changes in 2008, as the snowboarding event was moved to the Keystone ski resort near Boulder, Colorado

Boulder, Colorado

Boulder is the county seat and most populous city of Boulder County and the 11th most populous city in the U.S. state of Colorado. Boulder is located at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of...

. The competitive eating, Ultimate, and freeskiing competitions were also added that year. Also, the Nationals debuted on terrestrial television

Terrestrial television

Terrestrial television is a mode of television broadcasting which does not involve satellite transmission or cables — typically using radio waves through transmitting and receiving antennas or television antenna aerials...

 when CBS Sports

CBS Sports

CBS Sports is a division of CBS Broadcasting which airs sporting events on the American television network. Its headquarters are in the CBS Building on West 52nd Street in midtown Manhattan, New York City, with programs produced out of Studio 43 at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street.CBS...

 aired the first of eight one-hour episodes on May 25.

Hosts

The 2008 event hosts were Jonny Moseley

Jonny Moseley

Jonathan William Moseley, better known as Jonny Moseley , is the first Puerto Rican to become a member of the U.S. Ski Team.-Early years:...

, Olympic champion in moguls skiing, and Jenn Brown. Carter Blackburn

Carter Blackburn

Carter Blackburn is an American sportscaster. He currently works for ESPN and ESPNU as play-by-play announcer on various telecasts. By age thirty-one, Blackburn had called the NFL on Fox, NCAA Basketball Tournaments on CBS, and college football on ABC...

 was the boxing announcer, and Chris McGee

Chris McGee

Chris McGee is the MC of the Association of Volleyball Professionals.McGee is the person who introduces the players at the finals of the AVP tournaments.McGee has been the AVP spokesperson for the past eight years....

 and Holly McPeak

Holly McPeak

Holly McPeak is an American beach volleyball player.McPeak has 72 career beach volleyball titles and $1.4 million USD in career earnings, which are third and second respectively of any woman in the history of professional beach volleyball...

 called the beach volleyball matches.

Sponsors

Because the event is not NCAA-sanctioned, sponsors can display their advertising at the competition venues. In 2008, they included Edge shave gel

Procter & Gamble

Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....

 and Jack in the Box.

Additional information

Of the events on the Collegiate Nationals program, only two have any ties to actual NCAA sports. Many of the beach volleyball players also play in the indoor version of the game, and boxing was a NCAA-sanctioned sport until 1961, when the death of a boxer who attended Wisconsin

Wisconsin Badgers

The Wisconsin Badgers are the collegiate athletic teams from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This NCAA Division I athletic program has teams in football, basketball, ice hockey, volleyball, soccer, cross country, tennis, swimming, wrestling, track and field, rowing, golf, and softball...

caused such outcry that the organization stripped the sanction.