Hounds Earn AVCA Team Academic Award for 2015-16
LEXINGTON, Ky. --- The American Volleyball Coaches Association released a record 762 college, including Moravian College, and high school volleyball teams that have earned the 2015-16 AVCA Team Academic Award.
LEXINGTON, Ky. --- The American Volleyball Coaches Association released a record 762 college, including Moravian College, and high school volleyball teams that have earned the 2015-16 AVCA Team Academic Award.
The award, which began in 1992-93, honors college and high school teams that displayed excellence in the classroom by maintaining at least a 3.30 cumulative team grade-point average during the 2015-16 school year and passed last year's mark of 757 schools honored in 2014-15. Nominating coaches must be AVCA members.
The AVCA Team Academic Award has become one of the AVCA's fastest growing awards programs, seeing an impressive surge in teams honored over the past several years. Since the 2000-2001 season, the number of recipients have increased every single year but one, while amassing a 475 team increase over the span of the last decade. Since the award's inception in 1993, the amount of award winners has increased from 62 to its current number of 762.
Girls high school led the way with a record number of recipients with 260. NCAA Division I honored 131 programs while NCAA Division II also set a new record by reaching a total of 119 honorees. NCAA Division III matched its 2014-15 total 140 schools taking home the honor.
Over 1,000 different schools have earned the award in the program's 24-year history, with exactly 7,640 awards been given out in total.
Moravian, under the direction of 24-year head coach Shelley Bauder, earned the AVCA Team Academic Award for the tenth time since the award was started. The Greyhounds and fellow Landmark Conference schools The University of Scranton and Susquehanna University received the honor.
"It's so exciting to earn the AVCA Academic Award again for the second year in a row," Bauder said. "We continually emphasize the importance of time management and have regular meetings with the players to check on their academic progress. The upperclassmen do a great job discussing effective strategies with the first year players and clearly all these things paid off. I'm very proud of my team and the award they earned."
Coach Bauder and the Greyhounds will begin their 2016 season on Friday, September 2 when the squad hosts Centenary (N.J.) College and Medaille (N.Y.) College in Johnston Hall as part of the 14th Annual Greyhound Premiere.
To view the entire 2015-16 AVCA Team Academic Award recipients, visit https://www.avca.org/awards/2015-2016-avca-team-academic-award-recipients.html.
