For the 2023–24 season, it had 241 member institutions,[3] of which two are in British Columbia, one in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the rest in the continental United States, with over 83,000 student-athletes participating.

CBS Sports Network, formerly called CSTV, serves as the national media outlet for the NAIA.

The goal of the tournament was to establish a forum for small colleges and universities to determine a national basketball champion.

On March 10, 1940, the National Association for Intercollegiate Basketball (NAIB) was formed in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1952, the NAIB was transformed into the NAIA, and with that came the sponsorship of additional sports such as men's golf, tennis and outdoor track and field.

The 1948 NAIB national tournament was the first intercollegiate postseason to feature a Black student-athlete, Clarence Walker of Indiana State under coach John Wooden.

[10][11] The NAIA began sponsoring intercollegiate championships for women in 1980, the second coed national athletics association to do so, offering collegiate athletics championships to women in basketball, cross country, gymnastics, indoor and outdoor track and field, softball, swimming and diving, tennis and volleyball.

In the summer of 1976, the NAIA sent Henderson State and Texas A&I to play 5 exhibition games in West Berlin, Vienna, Nuremberg, Mannheim and Paris.

[18] In December 2020, Chloe Mitchell, a volleyball player at NAIA member Aquinas College who at the time had more than 2 million followers on TikTok with a series of do-it-yourself home improvement videos, became the first college student-athlete known to have profited from an endorsement under the current rules.

Effective with the 2020–21 academic year, the NAIA returned to a single division for both men's and women's basketball.