Alexandria, LA (7/23/2024) – LSUA earned its first Barnes & Noble College Red River Athletic Conference (RRAC) GPA Award as the top RRAC program in academic performance for the 2023-24 academic year. A member of the RRAC since 2016, LSUA student-athletes composed a 3.26 cumulative GPA total, with 99 receiving RRAC Scholar-Athlete distinction with a 3.0 grade point average or better.
The RRAC GPA Award is presented annually to the athletic program with the best cumulative GPA among all of its student-athletes in the most recent academic year. The award encompasses all conference sports and any NAIA-certified student-athletes during the 2023-24 seasons.
“We have had a very successful year athletically, but I am even more proud of this academic accomplishment by our student-athletes,” noted LSUA Athletic Director Tyler Unsicker. “It’s a real tribute to their hard work in the classroom.”
Looking at the cumulative GPA across all sports over the last three years while Unsicker has been athletic director, an impressive picture of academic growth emerges. This year’s 3.26 GPA marks a 7.5% increase over last year and an impressive 11.2% increase since the 2021-22 school year.
Individual sport GPAs tell the real story. Consider LSUA’s women’s teams. Over the same three-year period, Women’s Soccer and Women’s Basketball have been relatively stable, each up around 1% with a 3.23 and 3.24 GPA, respectively. Softball increased by 12.8% to 3.36, and tennis’s 11.6% increase earned them the highest team GPA at an outstanding 3.95!
LSUA’s men’s sports show similar progress, with one notable exception. GPAs for Baseball and Men’s Soccer both experienced +7% growth over the last three years to 2.80 and 3.34, respectively. Most impressively, the team with the greatest academic growth was men’s basketball, which finished the year with a combined 2.93 GPA. This marks an astonishing +45.4% increase over the last year that Coach Jackson has led the team and a +57.7% increase during Unsicker’s tenure as Athletic Director. These young men have truly upheld their commitment to excellence on and off the court.
Dimario Jackson, Head Coach of LSUA Men’s Basketball, said, “My coaching staff and I emphasize winning on three levels: Win in the CLASSROOM, Win in the COMMUNITY, Win on the BASKETBALL COURT…in that order!! We firmly believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. We emphasize attacking the classroom and assignments with the same mindset we have for a basketball game…and that is to win. We challenge our guys to do their very best in everything, and they will reap the benefits. We recruit STUDENT-athletes;student comes first! No win is bigger for us than seeing our guys walk across the stage and get their degrees.”
Across the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the minimum GPA to for athletic eligibility is a 2.0. As many as half of the athletic teams in the NAIA have at least a 3.0 team cumulative GPA.
Written by Adam Lord
Photo credit – LSUA Division of Strategic Communications
Photo – Coach Dimario Jackson with LSUA Basketball players
