Friday, June 24, 2011

NAU Stands Tall with Andreassen and Department's Academic Achievements

By Steve Shaff, Assistant AD/Media Relations
NAU soccer standout Kristi Andreassen.

As a member of the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) Academic All-America committee, I got my ballot for the Academic All-America® Team Member of the Year yesterday. For the second straight year a Lumberjack student-athlete was on the ballot and I was very proud.

I have served on the Academic All America committee since 1994 and been the SID at NAU since 2000. CoSIDA began this program in the 1950's, and since then, has honored thousands of deserving student-athletes from numerous sports and across all divisions with these elite Capital One Academic All-America® scholar-athlete honors.

I joined the committee to honor my former boss at Florida, John Humenik, who was one of the early supporters of the program, and push our top student-athletes each year for the status of Academic All-American.

Currently, CoSIDA honors Academic All-Americans in 12 sports. Soccer’s Kristi Andreassen, who is from Tempe, Ariz., earned the distinction as the Academic All-American of the Year for women’s soccer this fall. She followed in the footsteps of track standout David McNeill, who earned the honor in his sport in 2010. It is a great honor to be an Academic All-American but to be named the “Best of the Best” in her sport is special territory.

She is well deserved and has continued to pile on the list of awards during her senior season. She is a 2011 NCAA Postgraduate recipient and NAU’s NCAA Women of the Year nominee after earning Athlete of the Year and Golden Eagle Scholar-Athlete of the Year accolades on campus.

To fully appreciate the magnitude of the accomplishment takes another look at the ballot.

She is on the ballot against the best in each sport in college sports. She has some great company including household names like Butler’s Matt Howard, who led his team to back-to-back Final Four’s, Alabama’s Greg McElroy and Connecticut’s Maya Moore, one of the top collegiate basketball players of all time. There are also student-athletes from Stanford, Brigham Young and Oregon. Eight of the 12 are from BCS schools.

As Andreassen proudly puts Northern Arizona on the ballot, she represents a department that has academics at the forefront of its mission. The Lumberjacks recorded a cumulative grade point average of 3.05 GPA among its more than 300 student-athletes at the completion of the spring semester.  The positive grade report comes after a semester that produced a school-record fifty-five student-athletes participating in spring commencement ceremonies. NAU also recently had all 15 sponsored sports are exceeding NCAA academic standards in the Academic Progress Report.

NAU is doing it right. In today’s collegiate world, it is rare.

MY VOTE
1.Matt Howard, Butler
2.Kristi Andreassen, Northern Arizona
3. Maya Moore, Connecticut

Reigning University Division Academic All-Americans of the Year
Matt Howard, Butler (Men's Basketball)
Kristi Andreassen, Northern Arizona (Women's Soccer)
Ashley Brignac, Louisiana (Softball)
Alex Klineman, Stanford (Volleyball)
Matt Rice, Western Kentucky (Baseball)
Miles Batty, Brigham Young (Men's Track/Cross Country)
Maya Moore, Connecticut (Women's Basketball)
Kofi Sarkodie, Akron (Men's Soccer)
Kayla Hoffman, Alabama (Women's At-Large)
Nick Amuchastegui, Stanford (Men's At-Large)
Greg McElroy, Alabama (Football)
Jordan Hasay, Oregon (Women's Track/Cross Country)

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