Subsequently, Cassell resigned in March 1942 to become athletic director and head football coach at Morningside College in Iowa.

[13] Due to the emergency caused by World War II and the limited sports schedule, he was not replaced until Stafford Cassell returned to AU as athletic director on January 3, 1946.

[14] During the interim, and during the years of Cassell's second tenure, the AU men's basketball team won the Mason–Dixon Conference championship in 1945, 1946, 1950, and 1951.

[8] Cassell was replaced in March 1952 by Hugo "Dutch" Schulze, a former captain of the AU men's basketball team and an outstanding football and baseball player at the school in the 1930s.

[15][16] Schulze replaced Artie Boyd as men's head basketball coach, but he was only able to lead the team to a dismal 50–51 record.

In 1979, Frailey named and co-founded the Colonial Athletic Association, the NCAA Division I league in which AU teams now began to participate.

Ladner also forced McElroy to switch AU's affiliation from the Colonial Athletic Association to the Patriot League.

Allegedly frustrated by Ladner's interference, on July 5, 2000, McElroy announced he was resigning to become athletic director at the State University of New York at Albany.

Radakovich had previously served as the chief financial officer of the athletic department at the University of South Carolina.

[25] Radakovich resigned after just eight months on the job[26] to become senior associate athletic director at Louisiana State University.

[27] In November 2001, Ladner hired Tom George, a 20-year veteran of sports industry marketing with Octagon, to be the university's new AD.

Changes in the university's approach to athletics, made under his predecessor, Dr. Benjamin Ladner, began to bear fruit in championship teams and national press attention.

After a nearly seven-month search, President Kerwin hired Keith Gill as AU's new athletic director on March 21, 2007.

[31] On February 28, 2013, President Kerwin announced that AU had hired Dr. William "Billy" Walker to be the new athletic director.

Dr. Walker retired from the Air Force in July 2013 at the rank of brigadier general, and awarded the Legion of Merit.

[35] In 1984, the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) South voted to begin hosting championships in sports other than basketball.

American University officials worried about the level of competition in the league, and the level of concern rose dramatically when the NCAA announced it was considering no longer extending automatic bids to the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship for leagues with fewer than eight members.

The CAA allowed AU to offer athletic scholarships in all sports, while the Patriot League only permitted this in basketball.

They were also concerned that the level of play in the Patriot League was of much lower quality than in the CAA, and that attendance at AU sporting events would drop significantly.

More local colleges played in the CAA than in the Patriot League, which critics felt meant higher attendance.

Another factor was the make-up of AU's student body, 30 percent of which came from the geographic area covered by the Patriot League.

AU officials also felt the Patriot League was more stable than the CAA, which had seen high turnover in membership over the past few years.

The team had a long losing streak in NCAA competition, and President Ladner considered closing the program.

Instead, Ladner agreed to infuse the program with a significant amount of new funding and make AU into a national wrestling powerhouse.

In the summer of 2000, AU served as the practice site for Newcastle United, one of England's premier professional soccer clubs.

Major League Soccer's D.C. United, Miami Fusion and San Jose Earthquakes have also practiced at AU.

National teams from the United States, Bolivia and Portugal trained at Reeves in 1996 in preparation for Summer Olympic games held at RFK Stadium.

Naval Observatory, located about two miles from American University, to run the track at Reeves Field.

They demolished the tennis courts in the spring of 2024 in order to build an expanded athletics facility, the Meltzer Center.