Belmont ranked fifth nationally in academics

STAFF REPORT

BSN

ATLANTA – For the third time in the last five years, the Belmont University women’s basketball team finished within the Top 10 of all NCAA Division I programs in terms of grade point average for the academic calendar. The Bruins posted a remarkable 3.803 team GPA in 2023-24, the fifth-highest team GPA in the nation while recording 20 wins for the ninth consecutive season.

It is the first time Belmont has placed within the top five nationally in team GPA since the 2002-03 season.

Lawrence County High School graduate Kensley Feltner contributed to the Belmont women’s basketball team’s academic success. Feltner concluded her freshman year at Belmont in May. The all-time leading scorer for Lawrence County, Feltner will be back on the court for Belmont as a sophomore in the fall.

Belmont earned its 14th overall WBCA Academic Top 25 Team Honor Roll award.

Tradition-rich Belmont has finished within the top 20 of the WBCA Academic Top 25 Team Honor Roll eight of the last 10 years.

Of the top five teams on the 2023-24 Academic Top 25 Team Honor Roll, only Belmont and Maine reached national postseason play. The Black Bears made the NCAA Tournament, while Belmont earned an at-large bid to the inaugural Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament (WBIT). The Bruins won the first-ever WBIT game at Ball State.

Both Tuti Jones and Liz Suder registered unblemished 4.0 GPAs for the 2023-24 academic year and eight of Belmont’s 13 student-athletes notched a perfect 4.0 GPA at least one of the two semesters.

Jones and former Bruin Tessa Miller were Missouri Valley Conference Scholar-Athlete First Team selections and Jones, Miller, former Belmont student-athlete Kilyn McGuff, and Blair Schoenwald garnered College Sports Communicators (CSC) Academic All-District recognition following the season. For their outstanding work in the classroom, Jones and Miller landed a spot on the Division I-AAA Athletics Directors Association (DI-AAA ADA) Scholar-Athlete Team with the pair earning national academic honors. Jones was chosen as the female recipient of the 2024 DI-AAA ADA Postgraduate Scholarship and Miller was named 2024 DI-AAA ADA Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

The WBCA Academic Top 25 recognizes NCAA Division I, II and III, NAIA and two-year college women’s basketball teams across the nation that carry the highest combined GPAs inclusive of all student-athletes on their rosters for the entire season. The 2023-24 season is the 29th in which the WBCA has compiled the honor rolls.

A team’s GPA is calculated by dividing the total number of quality points (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, F=0) earned by the total number of academic hours attempted by all team members in the academic terms (semesters or quarters) that the season spans. Weighted grades are converted to a 4.0 scale. The GPAs are rounded to the nearest thousandth of a point. Teams must be nominated for the honor by their head coach who must be a WBCA member. A team must have a 3.000 or better GPA to be nominated.