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Hoya ladies outsmart the guys
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The 2008-2009 Big East Academic All-Star Nominations are out, and it's full of Hoya basketball players. Unfortunately for John Thompson III, most of the credit goes to his x-chromosomed counterpart, Terri Williams-Flournoy, and her crew of talented and brainy ladies.
Five of the eight Hoya ballers who made the list, Meredith Cox, Aminata Diop, Krystle Hatton, Kenya Kirrkland and Beata Widding, were women, compared to the three men who recieved nominations: Ryan Dougherty, Byron Jansen and Julian Vaughn.
To be eligible for the team, a nominee must have competed in a Big East-sponsored sport, earned a varsity letter, attained a minimum grade-point average of 3.00 for the preceding academic year, and completed a minimum of two consecutive semesters or three consecutive quarters of academic work, with a total of 18 semester or 27 quarter credits, not including remedial courses.
Unfortunately for both sides, these nominations argue that a "student-athlete" and an "athlete-student" are exclusive from one another. Neither the men's, nor the women's team can cite a player who averaged more than 17 minutes per game (Hatton led both sexes with a solid 16.5 minutes per game), and in the cases of Diop and Dougherty, neither player made it into a single game.
The problem of nominating a player with no actual playing experience will likely fix itself once the actual academic awards come out, but for the time being, listing either of these players in the realm of team academic achievement is nothing more than grade inflation. It's on the consciences of Thompson and Williams-Flournoy if Diop and Dougherty's grades are factored into the team GPA, but pinning all the blame on a pair of faculty members will do nothing to solve the problem.
Georgetown interim athletic director Daniel R. Porterfield, Ph.D faces strict obligations from the NCAA to sustain the guise of putting scholarly behavior first, while counting the millions of dollars in TV revenue with the other hand. Expecting one school to swim against the waves of institutional behavior is like asking a fish to veer from its school in the middle of a shark's feeding hour. Every other university would frown with condescention as the NCAA takes a bite out of the Hoya athletic department, before getting back to grade inflation and "unsupervised practices".
It's a sad reality, and the only way to counteract this trend is an institutional change, or for the biggest teams, like Duke, UNC, Georgetown, UCLA and many others to lead by example, and leave players without any game experience off of their team's cumulative GPA. But no one stands to gain from these options, so it's more realistic to expect more of the same.
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