Kansas earns 30th-straight CSCAA Scholar All-America Team honor

NORFOLK, Va. – Kansas swimming & diving head coach Clark Campbell knows the importance of academics with his teams, and for the 30th-straight semester his squad has earned College Swimming Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) Scholar All-America Team honors for the Spring 2017 semester. To add to the team honor, five student-athletes notched Individual Scholar All-American Honorable Mention accolades.
 
Sophomore Haley Bishop, freshman Haley Downey, junior Nadia Khechfe, freshman Jenny Nusbaum and senior Pia Pavlic were the five Jayhawks to earn individual honors.
 
“It’s one of our top priorities every year,” Campbell said of the Academic All-America Team honor. “We try to be the best version of ourselves in both the classroom and the pool. In the classroom, we have some benchmarks that we shoot for every year, we always set a GPA goal and always being Academic All-America as a team. They take ownership of the goals and really get after it.”
 
To be selected as a CSCAA Scholar All-America team, programs must have achieved a team grade point average of 3.0 or higher over the fall semester. The Jayhawks a program-best 3.59 GPA, which was the highest for any Kansas Athletics team, with the entire department setting a new combined GPA record of 3.09.
 
“Having Laura Jacobsen as our academic coach for the last 15 years has just been amazing,” Campbell said. “She is a terrific academic advisor, making sure everyone is on track and doing what they need to do. The bottom line of all of this though, is the team works hard. Not only are they training but they are going to class and studying, and they do a really good job of it. Consistency has been really good. It has been something we have really focused on and done well at. It is a tradition of excellence now with our team, and each year, they never want to be that team that ends the streak. The standard is high, and they come in and they achieve it.”
 
It was a banner semester for the CSCAA and programs across the nation, as a record 720 teams, representing 443 institutions, earned a grade point average of 3.0 or higher.
 
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