Ayana Dow, a former member of the Towson University tennis team, celebrates following one of the university’s six spring 2015 commencement ceremonies held last month.
Ask Towson’s athletics coaches and they’ll tell you that victories are definitely important. But those same coaches will also be the first to tell you that what matters most is their players’ performance in the classroom. And according to the latest NCAA Division I Academic Progress Report (APR), TU student-athletes are achieving incredible success on and off the field of play.
The NCAA holds Division I institutions accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes through the APR, a team-based metric that accounts for the eligibility and retention of each student-athlete per academic term. Each of Towson’s 19 intercollegiate teams scored above the NCAA threshold of a multi-year APR score of at lest 930.
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Every Tiger squad scored at least a 965 for the 2013-14 academic year. And for the second straight year, at least 10 sports (baseball, men’s golf, gymnastics, field hockey, women’s lacrosse, women’s golf, women’s cross country, women’s tennis, women’s soccer, and women’s basketball) recorded a perfect single-year APR of 1,000.
Along with the 10 perfect scores, ten TU teams (baseball, men’s swimming and diving, women’s swimming and diving, women’s lacrosse, women’s cross country, women’s tennis, women’s soccer, women’s outdoor track & field, softball, and women’s indoor track & field) also have earned the highest APR scores in their sport among the Division I schools in the University System of Maryland.
As Towson’s student-athletes continue to excel in the classroom, the hard work of the university’s athletic department’s Academic Achievement staff has been crucial in enabling them to reach those record-setting numbers. This impressive performance includes the distinction of having the highest graduation rate (74%) among African-American student-athletes in all public Division I institutions in the nation.
Because of these outstanding numbers, the Academic Achievement staff, led by Assistant Athletic Director for Academic Achievement Geoff Gordon, recently received the 2015 President’s Diversity Administrative Department Award.
“You want to do the best you can for all student-athletes, but to see yourself leading the country in anything is a great feat,” said Gordon. “I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished with this. Most of this credit though goes to the hard work of the student-athletes themselves.”
Towson also boasts the highest graduation rate (71%) for all student-athletes regardless of race among all University System of Maryland Division I schools.
“I think it’s very important that we are graduating our student-athletes at an exceptionally high rate because that’s what our job is,” said Towson Director of Athletics Tim Leonard. “We’re supposed to develop young people as students and as athletes. The first part of that is student, and I think that we’re doing that.
“Here at Towson, ‘student-athlete’ isn’t a catch-phrase,” Leonard added. “It’s a lifestyle.”
