Putting the 'Student' in Student-Athlete

Putting the ‘Student’ in Student-Athlete
As proud as we are of our program’s success on the basketball court (I promise you, collecting championship rings NEVER gets old!), we are even MORE proud of what our players have accomplished in the classroom! Here are just a few of our academic highlights from the past year – not as fun to look at as our basketball highlight film (thank you Julie Baker!), but equally impressive:
- A 3.5 team GPA for the year - #6 IN THE NATION
- 6 players with a perfect 4.0 in the Fall of ‘09
- 3 players with a perfect 4.0 in the Spring of ‘10
- 14 players posted a Spring semester GPA of 3.2 or higher
- 14 players have a cumulative GPA of 3.2 or higher
- Maggie Hennegan and Laura Bugher were named to the ESPN The Magazine Academic All-District Team
- Laura Bugher was a finalist for the Senior Scholar Athlete of the Year
- Maggie Hennegan was a finalist for the Junior Scholar Athlete of the Year
- Of the 13 members of the MAC All-Academic Team, BGSU had FIVE team members; no other team had more than one
- This summer, our players posted 19 A’s out of 24 classes taken

This academic success of the student-athlete is not limited to only our program, however. Earlier this week the MAC announced that BGSU earned the 2009-10 MAC Institutional Academic Achievement Award. This annual award is presented to the MAC member who’s student-athletes have earned the highest GPA. With a GPA of 3.107 among our student-athletes, we edged the school up north for this tremendous honor, making it even that much more special!
The academic accolades don’t stop there, as on the heels of winning the MAC Institutional Academic Achievement Award for ALL our student-athletes, our female athletes continued to garner honors as it was announced that BGSU won the 2009-10 Mid-American Conference Faculty Athletic Representatives Academic Achievement Award! This award is designed to recognize the conference institution with the overall highest grade point average of student-athletes based on gender. Though this award is only three years old, our female student-athletes have won it twice!
A huge congratulations to ALL of our student-athletes for the tremendous year of success in the classroom! We are very, very proud that our athletes know they are students first!