Many of the athletic programs at LSU achieved national att ention for their accomplishments this past season, but what received little mention and was somewhat overshadowed were the LSU student-athletes’ accomplishments in the classroom. Last fall students filled their Saturdays with day-long tailgates en route to watch the football team’s win against the University of Miami in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. This past spring nearly an entire student body found itself suffering from March Madness, watching both the men’s and women’s basketball teams reach the Final Four. Over the past years ESPN, CBS and other sporting networks across Louisiana broadcasted games and highlights for an entire nation to watch. Although the publicity for the school may have been welcomed, the work and achievements made by LSU’s student athletes in the classroom were never posted on billboards, televised on “SportsCenter” or analyzed by Lee Corso of ESPN’s “College GameDay.” Of the 28,423 students enrolled at LSU this past spring, 414 participated in at least one of 16 team sports at LSU. Of these 414 student athletes, 50 percent (207) earned a grade point average of 3.00 or better, 19 percent (79) had a GPA of 3.50 or better and 6.7 percent (28) had a perfect 4.0 GPA. These numbers are a representation of something LSU Athletics Director Skip Bertman called “one of the best academic years LSU athletics has seen.” “It’s been an amazing, unbelievable five-year period and the Academic Center, [former Executive Director] Roger Grooters and now [Executive Director] Tomas [Jimenez] have really implemented a phase of athletics that has put us into a different stratosphere,” Bertman said. “I am very, very proud of that; probably more proud of that than anything that has been accomplished, including many national championships by many teams.” Bertman said most LSU teams continue to perform better now than they have in the past, but looking deeper into what the public relations departments at LSU have shown their audiences one will find that major sports such as football, basketball and baseball seem to lag behind smaller programs such as gymnastics, golf and tennis when it comes to team GPAs. Although ticket sales and revenue earnings may be consistently low, student athletes of minor sports at the University continue to outperform the more marketable and high profile sports of football and baseball in the classrooms. With all nine players achieving a 3.0 or higher during the spring, the members of the women’s golf team averaged a 3.389 GPA during a semester in which they participated in eight NCAA tournaments, seven of which required the players to miss school because of travel arrangements. With this average, the women’s golf team may have posted the highest GPA of any program in this spring, but other teams continue to perform at a high level in the classroom as well. LSU women’s golf coach Karen Bahnsen said the team takes pride in the fact that they have had one of the highest GPAs over the past few years. “I think us and baseball are the two teams that missed the most amount of school over the spring,” Bahnsen said. “It takes a lot of dedication and discipline on my team’s part. We are very structured and very organized, and [the players] work very hard while on the road.” Led by 10 Southeastern Conference Academic Honor Roll players, including two players who received the award in both 2004 and 2005, the LSU soccer team posted the second highest cumulative team GPA of 3.263. LSU soccer coach Brian Lee said he is proud of the team’s work off the field, and he believes smaller sports outperform larger, more publicized sports because of the educational background of the players. “With soccer, we’ve got kids with private school educations and things like that coming into our team, and I bet our average SAT and GPA in high school was higher,” Lee said. “So they are coming in with better habits.” Lee also said regardless of what sport you play, student athletes do not have a reason to fall behind because the support the University offers them is something an athlete cannot find at every university. “Our academic part of sports is unbelievable here,” Lee said. “As a student athlete, there is no one to blame but yourself if you don’t take advantage of our support system like the Cox Academic Center. There’s nothing like it anywhere; it’s unbelievable with the amount of support behind it and the people that are over there.” Besides women’s golf and soccer, seven other teams – women’s swimming and diving, gymnastics, men’s golf, men’s and women’s tennis and men’s basketball – earned a 3.0 GPA or higher for the spring semester. For coaches, such as men’s basketball coach John Brady, the 3.011 team GPA the men’s basketball team posted will earn him $12,500 of “supplemental compensation,” an amount he will receive for every academic year the team earns a 3.0 GPA or better. Led by sophomore Staten Spencer’s 4.0 GPA this past school year the players on the women’s tennis team combined and averaged a 3.032 GPA for the spring semester. Spencer’s perfect GPA earned her a 2006 Intercollegiate Tennis Association Scholar Athlete award. “It was difficult, but I just concentrated on school last year,” Spencer said. “I figured since I was hurt, this was the best way for me to contribute to the team.” LSU women’s tennis coach Tony Minnis said he believes the players’ backgrounds reflects their classroom performance. “I think in the case of tennis, it’s always been kind of an economically upper-class sport where a lot of the kids come from families with money,” Minnis said. “I think that generally if your parents are doctors or lawyers, you’re more likely to be more academically oriented.” Minnis and Lee both agreed that the success of a college program should not always depend on the number of fans and the money brought in but also by the work athletes do away from the sport they play. Although, according to the LSU Athletic Department, they are the only two sports that brought in positive revenue in 2005, the fact remains that the baseball and football teams had the lowest GPAs of any team sport in the spring. Tommy Powell, director of academics for student athletes, said the size of each sports roster creates a false representation of how the players on the team are performing in school. “I don’t think it’s not always fair to say one sport will do better on a consistent basis than other ones,” Powell said. “You’ve got to look at a variable of things. You’ve got to look at sport’s size; in tennis you might have six guys [or] seven guys, so one high GPA and the rest midline could effect that total GPA. Football, you got a huge roster of a hundred and something people so there’s many fluctuations in that.” Although Powell may have a point with seven of the nine teams that averaged a 3.0 GPA or higher having 15 or fewer players on the team’s roster, Minnis said he believes you have to look elsewhere to find the root of the problem. “I don’t think it’s actually each sport, but it’s the individual and how committed they are to academics,” Minnis said. “I think it has to do more with the focus of your upbringing and if you have people that are really emphasizing athletics more than academics.” Powell said too much emphasis is put on a team’s average, and one has to evaluate each player separately to get an accurate depiction of how a team is performing in the classroom. “I’m a little hesitant to say that it is different sports perform better because that’s not always the case,” Powell said. “It’s just the different individuals on the team at that particular point in time. Look at Rudy Niswanger last year, who got the Draddy Award. He was the smartest guy in the world basically in college football, so it’s not just a sport, it’s individuals that are within that sport.” Bertman agreed with Powell and added that sports such as football and baseball at other schools continuously perform at a lower level than minor sports teams at their respective schools. “All football teams score lower than all golf teams, tennis teams, swimming teams, baseball teams . . . that’s just the way it is,” Bertman said. “Basketball teams for men also score lower than some of the other sports. I don’t know exactly why that’s true, but that’s just the way it is.” Bertman said to get a real indication of how a team is performing, one cannot compare it to other sports at the same university, but compare it to teams of the same sport at other schools – something the NCAA has tried to simplify. In 2004, the NCAA developed and implemented an Academic Progress Report to determine and examine the academic progress of student athletes. Each student athlete is awarded one point each semester for meeting eligibility requirements and another point if he or she remains at the institution they were enrolled in the previous semester. This means every year each student athlete can be awarded four total points for their work during the fall and spring semesters. The teams’ APR score is calculated by taking the total points earned and dividing it by the total number of possible points the team could have earned. The NCAA has set a cutoff score of 925 points. If a team continuously does not reach this mark of 925, it can face penalties, such as loss of scholarships. Powell said the points system can be a little confusing, but it is a way for the NCAA to monitor each team’s progression. “If you were a student athlete and after this spring you were academically eligible and by the fourteenth class day this fall you come back to LSU, you get both points,” Powell said. “If you were academically ineligible after this spring but you came back to LSU, you would get one out of the two points. That system is based on the fall and spring semesters, you can get four points total – two each semester.” In a public report released Feb. 27 by the NCAA, most of LSU’s athletic teams met the 925 cutoff score with the exceptions of baseball and men’s basketball. The LSU baseball team scored 921, and the men’s basketball compiled a score of 860 for the 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 academic school years. This report showed the men’s tennis team had the highest APR of any LSU athletic program with a score of 1000. The gymnastics team finished a close second, earning a score of 991. Herb Vincent, LSU senior associate athletics director, said he believes the APR for the teams at LSU are a better representation of how a team is performing and how they are improving over the years. “If you look at the APR scores, you will see that our teams meet and exceed the standards set by the NCAA,” Vincent said. “When you compared our scores with those of other SEC schools, we think we are doing pretty good.” Vincent pointed out that although baseball may have the lowest GPA of any LSU sports team, their APR score is very high compared to other Southeastern Conference schools. That cannot be said about LSU’s football and basketball teams. With a score of 921, the baseball team tied for fifth best in the SEC, finishing behind Mississippi State University, Vanderbilt University, and the universities of Florida and Mississippi, respectively. The LSU men’s basketball team, on the other hand, had the lowest APR score of any SEC team. LSU and Auburn were the only two basketball teams in the conference with scores below 900. The LSU football team’s score of 935, ranked it eighth in the SEC behind powerhouses like Auburn, Florida and the universities of Georgia and Arkansas. If the football team can improve its APR score to 950 for the 2006-2008 academic school years, LSU football coach Les Miles will receive $25,000 in what his contract calls “supplemental compensation.” Miles will also receive payments of $50,000 for each academic school year the team earns a 2.8 GPA or higher. In addition to the $12,500 he will earn if the team maintains its high GPA, Brady will receive an additional $25,000 in compensation if the men’s basketball team’s score improves 65 points to 925 in time for the next APR release in 2008. The same can be said for the LSU women’s basketball team. If the team can improve its score of 933 up to 945 for the 2008 academic school year, coach Pokey Chatman will receive $25,000 in compensation. She will also receive payments of $50,000 for every academic school year the team earns a 3.0 GPA or higher. The additional money these coaches can earn is a small incentive designed to encourage them to put down the clipboards and headsets and help players improve their grades and catch up academically to other sports. Vincent said although sports like baseball and football statistically perform below other minor sports at LSU, some of the grades earned by the athletes compared to other schools are a reason for optimism. “Football is lower than men’s tennis, but if you look at football compared to other football schools, we think we’re doing pretty good,” Vincent said. “So if you compare LSU football with Georgia football, Auburn football, Alabama football, we think our GPAs are probably pretty good. We don’t have the numbers to show that, but when you compare LSU football to LSU men’s tennis, then yeah it’s not going to look as good.”
—–Contact Jay St. Pierre at [email protected]