Jayhawks earn top-three in Scholar All-America Team grade point average

LAWRENCE, Kan. – After tireless hours of hard work as a student and an athlete, the Kansas swimming and diving team was honored as the third-best Scholar All-America Team in all of the Division I women’s programs for the Fall 2018.
 
The award was selected and calculated by the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) Scholar All-American committee and was based on each collegiate team’s fall grade point average (GPA).
 
The Jayhawks combined for an accumulative total of a 3.69 GPA according to the CSCAA calculations. The team was recently awarded, through the University of Kansas, with an accumulative 3.70 GPA – recording the best GPA in Kansas Athletics history.
 
“Our number one goal each semester is being a Scholar All-American team,” head coach Clark Campbell said. “That is something that everybody can participate in and quite frankly we are in college athletics and we are student-athletes, student being first. There is no NFL or MBA of swimming, so we are all going to go on to something other than swimming at the end of our careers – so we make it a goal.”
 
Integrating a powerful academic plan is an important goal that Campbell has always had as a coach. The successes of the team, though, comes from the athletes themselves and the hard work that they put in all hours of the day to be the best versions of themselves.
 
“The team works really hard and they believe in the priorities that we set,” Campbell said. “I think it starts with recruiting. We let them know that academics are a huge part of our program and that attracts good people that are academically focused. And once they are here, we have a program and a mindset that supports academic excellence as well as athletic excellence in the pool.”
 
Receiving an honor like this comes from hard work on all scales, and in this program’s case, the countless efforts of help and support from the team’s academic advisor, Laura Jacobsen.
 
“We are very fortunate that (associate director for academic and career counseling) Laura Jacobsen is our academic adviser and has been with us all of the years that I have been here,” Campbell said. “She has set up an awesome program for academic success for all of our student-athletes.”
 
Having an advisor like Jacobsen who understands the goals and objectives that the team follows has been a major advantage to the cohesiveness that the team is able to create between being a high performance student and athlete.
 
“The bottom line is that we emphasize the student part first,” Campbell said. “Because, at the end of their four or five year career at KU, it is on to the next thing. And part of that will be brought on by what they did athletically, but the vast majority of it will be how they did in the classroom.”
 
It is no doubt that the efforts of each student-athlete have helped shape the standard that the Kansas swimming and diving team has set – one that they can be proud of and continue to encourage future teams to hold.
 
The Jayhawks will take this honor and use it to excel in the rest of their season as they prepare for their Spring 2019 semester.
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