William & Mary Athletics leads CAA in team academic excellence awards

Success in competition and the classroom is synonymous with William & Mary Athletics. The CAA has announced the recipients of the Team Academic Excellence awards for the 2017-18 season, and the Tribe led the way with four programs earning the distinction.
 
For the second-straight year, Tribe baseball received the league honor, while men's basketball, men's swimming and men's track and field garner the accolade for the first time. W&M won three awards in the inaugural year of the award last season.
 
The Team Academic Excellence Award recognizes the institution with the highest collective grade point average in all 22 sports sponsored by the CAA. The team GPA is a calculation of the grade point average of each student-athlete who appeared on an institution's roster throughout the final day of their respective championship seasons during the 2017-18 academic year.
 
The 22 awards were spread out over 10 different institutions. Following the Tribe's league-leading four awards, Drexel (women's basketball, women's lacrosse, women's swimming & diving), Hofstra (women's soccer, men's tennis, women's tennis), and Northeastern (women's cross country, women's track & field, volleyball) each had three programs recognized.
 
The CAA Team Academic Excellence awards add to the growing list of academic accolades for William & Mary Athletics over the last year. During the spring, 22 of 23 teams had a GPA over 3.0, including 17 with a 3.3 or better, and the department as a whole had a 3.27 cumulative GPA, the highest ever recorded.  A total of 162 athletes earned Provost's Awards, for having a GPA over 3.5.
 
Individually, men's basketball standout Paul Rowley '17 J.D. '20 was named the Colonial Athletic Association's Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year for all sports as well as for men's basketball specifically, and baseball's Bodie Sheehan '18 and Erin Menges '18 were W&M's Institutional CAA Scholar-Athletes of the Year.  On a national level, Ryder Bell '19 and Jacopo Gliozzi '19 both earned CoSIDA/Google Cloud Academic All-America honors.