A major difference between varsity and club sports is the source for allocated funds.
Varsity teams receive financial support, equipment, and facilities from college and university athletic department budgets.
For many years, National Collegiate Athletic Association rules prohibited college freshmen from playing on varsity teams.
In contrast, intramural sports (IM sports), consists of teams within the same school (the word intramural means "within the walls") and IM players rarely move to inter-collegiate teams.
It was held for the first time in 1878, and was started as a Dutch equivalent for the Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge.
The NCAA previously prohibited true freshmen from playing varsity college football and basketball; as a result, numerous junior-varsity "freshmen teams" appeared on many major college campuses.
The NCAA repealed this limitation in 1972;[11] to the extent that junior varsity teams exist at the college level, many are classified as club squads.
Many sports teams have assistant coaches responsible for developing the talent of junior varsity players.
The decision of when to play junior varsity players in a one-sided game is often at the coach's discretion.
When the winning team is ahead by a substantial margin late in the game, the coaches of both the winning and losing teams may "empty their benches"—that is, they remove the varsity players and play the junior varsity players for the remainder of the game.
For instance, in high school wrestling, there can only be one wrestler competing for a team at a particular weight class in a given varsity match.
This is often dependent on the size of the varsity team, availability of transportation and policies invoked by either the coach, school or league.