Academic Excellence for UofL Athletics -- SUNDAY CARDINAL COUPLE

Academic Excellence

The NCAA recently released an updated Academic Progress Report, which tracks the academic success of student athletes in a program across multiple years.  The Cardinals continue to do well in this area, with five UofL programs showing particularly high marks.

Both basketball squads, Women's Cross Country, Women's Golf, and Volleyball all were highlighted for being in the top 10 percent of programs nationwide.

Women's Basketball posted a 3.688 GPA for the spring semester - better than any GPA I ever maintained at any level of schooling - and a 3.415 for the academic year.  This marks the highest semester GPA for the squad in Jeff Walz' tenure, and the 2nd highest academic year GPA in his time as coach.  Thanks to social media, we know that one great contributor to that GPA was Dana Evans, who reported in with straight As in the spring semester.  Evans and Jazmine Jones were both named to the All-ACC Academic team.  Jones, Bionca Dunham, Kylee Shook, and Yacine Diop all graduated this spring.

Volleyball posted an amazing 3.845 GPA for the spring semester, with the whole team checking in
with 3.0 or better GPAs and 11 of them were above a 3.25.  Six players had a perfect 4.0 GPA, and while not explicitly listed, we can take a guess that they were Tori Dilfer, Alexis Hamilton, Aiko Jones, Melanie McHenry, Anna Stevenson and Amaya Tillman, as they were all named to the All-ACC Academic team.  McHenry was also awarded the ACC Postgraduate Scholarship for Volleyball.  McHenry expects to complete her undergraduate degree in December.

Softball's Celene Funke picked up a CoSIDA Academic All-District nod, which makes her eligible for the Academic All-American honor as well.  Funke, who just finished her 4th year of eligibility and will get another and return due to the spring sports seasons getting cut short by Covid-19, graduated with her undergraduate degree in Finance last May with a perfect 4.0.  She is a year into her MBA studies already and will get a 2nd year of it while still on scholarship.

Cardinal Couple Radio Hour

It was a bit of a rough outing for the CCRH yesterday.  We had a bit of an abortive start due to audio issues on my laptop.  I didn't have my normal headset (which uses a TRRS 3.5mm jack) and instead was using some USB-C earbuds.  I had to adjust the audio setup to accommodate and didn't get it quite right to start with.  I got it adjusted and we got the show started at about 2:30 in the stream.  You can also tell the quality of my audio is not quite what it normally is, though Case, Paulie, and Jared came across normally.  Earbuds just don't have the same quality of audio as a decent headset mic does (and you can also hear the earbud mic scraping against my beard, alas).

I also had Internet issues - again - and switched before the show started to my backup connection using my mobile phone.  Near the end of the show, that dropped out leading to garbled audio near the end and even eventually the stream just quit.

We did have some great discussions, looking into Lindsey Duvall's next steps, covered Soccer Head Coach Karen Ferguson Dayes' teleconference, the Softball teleconference with Holly Aprile, Caitlin Ferguson, and Celene Funke. 

We also brought back the Cardinal Couple quiz, but it fell prey to the above mentioned Internet issues.  I'm OK with not discussing it,  it since I ended up with only 30 points out of the possible 120.

You can check out the show below.

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JMcA