MORAGA, Calif. -- Student-Athletes at Saint Mary's College continue to rank among the best on the West Coast in academic performance, according to recent Academic Progress Rates released by the NCAA.
All 14 Gaels sports teams ranked among the upper-tier of multi-year APR listings and no team was in danger of incurring penalties for lack of academic success. Combined, SMC teams posted a multi-year average of 973 on data obtained from the 2006-07, 2007-08, 2008-09, 2009-10 academic years.
For the most recent single-season report, 2009-10, men's basketball, men's golf, women's cross country, women's rowing, softball and volleyball all scored a perfect 1,000.
The NCAA reported today that scorecards tracking classroom performance of Division I sports teams show continued improvement for most squads across the country.
According to the most recent figures, the latest four-year Division I Academic Progress Rate is 970, up three points over last year. The average four-year rate also rose in the high-profile sports of men's basketball, football and baseball.
Moving into its eighth year, APR has shifted the national dialogue to the point that even casual college sports fans are aware of it, said NCAA President Mark Emmert.
For the first time in history of intercollegiate sport, we have a common language and common expectation around academics," Emmert said. "The expectation is that every program will reach a certain level of academic performance, and that level is important. To this end, the reform effort has been almost immeasurable in its impact."
Emmert stressed that the NCAA's academic movement is evolving from reform to expectation of student-athlete academic success.
"So instead of reform, we look to academic success and academic performance as a natural and automatic expectation of being a student-athlete," Emmert said. "We need to keep working on that performance, just as a team works to improve its athletics performance, so their academics continue to rise as well."
In the NCAA's high-profile sports, football's average four-year APR is 946, up two points over last year; men's basketball is 945, up five points; and baseball is 959, up five points.
Every Division I sports team calculates its APR each academic year, based on the eligibility and retention of each scholarship student-athlete. Teams scoring below certain thresholds can face penalties, such as scholarship losses and restrictions on practice and competition. Rates are based on the past four years' performance.
Looking to the future, the Division I membership is examining how to further strengthen academics in a number of ways, said Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford and chair of the Division I Committee on Academic Performance.
Institutions can face restricted Division I membership for the entire athletics department if a team has four consecutive years of poor academic performance.
The most recent APR scores are multi-year rates based on the scores from the 2006-07, 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10 academic years.
APR scores per institution, along with penalties per school and teams receiving public recognition, are available online through the NCAA's searchable database.
