California Lutheran University placed 39 of its fall athletes on the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference’s all-academic teams in their respective sports. The conference awards athletes who have achieved a 3.4 GPA, completed one full year at their school and attained a sophomore athletic eligibility.
The students were awarded placement on the team based on participation in fall sports. Cal Lutheran placed athletes from all eligible sports including football, men’s and women’s cross country, men’s and women’s soccer, women’s volleyball and men’s water polo.
Out of the nine eligible sports, the Cal Lutheran women’s volleyball and women’s soccer teams impressed by placing eight and 11 athletes on the list, respectively.
Assistant Athletic Director in charge of eligibility and compliance and head softball coach Debby Day said she was very impressed by the number of scholar athletes.
“Obviously the school’s academic requirements to get in have gone up in the last 12 years and we are just seeing an overall higher GPA across the board,” Day said.
Cal Lutheran has a similar version of the SCIAC all-academic team, called the Scholar-Athlete Society. The difference is the Scholar-Athlete Society on campus honors athletes from every academic level and on a yearly basis, while the SCIAC all-academic team awards athletes for their work during their particular season and requires at least a sophomore status.
According to clusports.com, the scholar athlete society has grown greatly in the past few years due to more student athletes meeting the academic standards.
In 2012 Cal Lutheran inducted 117 student athletes into the society, followed by 145 in 2013 and 160 in 2014.
“Especially in the last four or five years, our athletes have really done a great job at maintaining high GPAs. They are self-driven,” Day said.
Cal Lutheran athletes compete in Division III of the NCAA where a high emphasis is placed on academics.
“The beauty of [Division III] is you really are a student athlete, and I think sometimes people think that sounds really cliché, but Division III has a lot of safeguards in place to make sure that our athletes are students first,” Day said. “It’s all about balance and letting athletes be normal students outside of their season.”
Hannah Nua, SCIAC all-academic team inductee for women’s volleyball, found traveling to away games to be time-consuming in terms of maintaining grades.
“You try to do as much homework as you can on the bus,” Nua said. “Some games are two, three hours away, like when you are going to Redlands. It’s three hours there, three hours back, not to mention the time it takes to warm up and play, so that’s a good chunk of your day.”
Nua had to plan carefully in order to maintain her scholar athlete GPA.
“I tried to plan my schedule so that I could get my classes out of the way and have a good two or three hours before practice so that I have time to eat and do some studying and then go to practice and then eat dinner and finish homework,” Nua said.
Day has a lot of respect for the commitment it takes to be a scholar athlete.
“It gets really hard. Unfortunately at a smaller school there are a limited number of classes you can take at a certain time. I can just speak for our softball team. There are days when we have four or five people leaving early or coming late,” Day said. “I think our coaches are really good at understanding that school is their number one priority, and we just like to make sure that sports are a very close number two.”
Kevin Repich
Staff Writer
Published March 18th, 2015