By: Patrick McHugh, News Staff
Northeastern is serious about the “student” in student-athlete.
Four NU athletic programs were publicly recognized by the NCAA for their multiyear academic progress rate (APR), which examines the eligibility, retention rate and graduation rate of each NCAA team’s student-athletes, and provides a measure of each team’s academic performance. Teams that score between a 978 and a perfect score of 1,000 are publicly recognized. The football, men’s cross country, women’s hockey and women’s rowing programs all were all recognized by the NCAA in the latest APR report.
“We are proud of all of our teams and their academic achievements, and we are particularly proud of the four teams that received this special recognition,” Athletics Director Peter Roby said.
The NCAA, as part of an effort to reform Division 1 academics, recognized the four Northeastern teams, who each rank in the top 10 of of their respective sports nationally.
The football team, which Roby eliminated last fall for budget reasons, was one of 26 recognized teams out of 225 in Division 1. The cross country team was named to the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association All-Academic team for having a team grade point average of 3.28. The women’s hockey team had a player, senior Katy Applin, who was named Northeastern’s 2010 recipient of the Jeanne Rowlands Award, annually given to the school’s top senior scholar-athlete. The women’s rowing team received APR recognition for the second year in a row and had four members of the team named National Scholar-Athletes by the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association last year.
“We were obviously ecstatic,” said Lauren DeSantis, director of student-athlete support services (SASS). “Whenever you’re recognized in a positive way by the NCAA is wonderful. A ton of credit goes to the student-athletes. They are the ones who are achieving these goals. They are the ones doing well in the classroom, doing well academically, doing well on the field, and graduating.”
SASS provides counseling, academic guidance, career assistance and community outreach resources to student-athletes at Northeastern.
“I help make sure we are running programs that support this everchanging student-athlete population in all areas,” DeSantis said. “Academically, socially, hopefully professionally in the future, and on the field too.”
DeSantis helped oversee a recent project aimed at assisting student-athletes that miss class due to travel. DeSantis, along with Roby, faculty athletic representative and business administration professor Fred Wiseman, director of academic technology Mark Staples, associate dean of business Coleen Pantalone and software licensing specialist Stephanie Trowbridge, contributed to an initiative to use motion capture technology to record class lectures for student-athletes who can’t attend class because of athletics obligations. Using Blackboard, the student-athletes can then catch up on classes they have missed. This spring student-athletes used the technology for the first time, and DeSantis said the results have been positive for the student-athletes.
“I think it’s always our goal to do the best we possibly can for our student-athletes,” DeSantis said. “As a student there’s no way to make up for actually being in class and lectures, and it’s difficult to miss class and still expect to do well academically. I think a program like this just makes it easier for them to maintain strong grades.”
