While Knights fans have been enjoying their summer vacations, here’s what they missed in UCF athletics headlines:
--For the first time in history, UCF sold out its allotment of football season tickets for the 2019 season.
--Fundraising for athletics at UCF in fiscal year 2019 (ending June 30) produced record numbers in terms of gifts received and overall gift commitments, nearly doubling the figure for total commitments from just a year ago. The last fiscal year included $31.7 million dollars committed from 7,519 donors and $13.6 million in gifts received. All three of those numbers are all-time highs for UCF athletics fundraising. This year’s overall figure for gift commitments represents almost twice the number from a year ago ($16.6 million). That same overall 2019 total is nearly four times what UCF booked just three years ago ($8 million, an increase of 296%, in fiscal year 2016).
--According to CBS Sports, UCF had the 17th best year in the nation thanks to their across-the-board athletic performance. CBS’s formula to pick the top collegiate athletics programs puts more weight on football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball, three marquee sports that UCF excelled in this past season. The football team went 12-1, won another American Athletic Conference Championship and earned a New Year’s Six bowl berth. Both the men’s and women’s basketball programs earned at-large bids to the NCAA Championship, with the men advancing to the second round. With two wild card sports--either baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer, gymnastics, lacrosse, hockey or wrestling--also added to the calculation, NCAA Championship runs by UCF’s volleyball and men’s soccer teams helped the Knights rise to the No. 17 slot. UCF was just ahead of Duke, Texas and Maryland in the top 20. The Knights were the only team in the top 25 from the American Athletic Conference, as Cincinnati came in tied for 38th. Michigan topped the chart for 2018-19.
--UCF athletic squads in volleyball and rowing captured American Athletic Conference Team Academic Excellence Awards, designating those two programs as the top performing academic teams in their respective AAC sports. In addition, a UCF record 253 members of various Knights teams earned spots on the AAC All-Academic Team. Knights programs in volleyball (3.71 grade-point average on 4.0 scale) and rowing (3.42 GPA) claimed the prestigious team awards which are based on each team’s cumulative GPA following the 2018-19 academic year.
--UCF is the only FBS program in the country that had each of its sports produce winning records (among the 10 Knights sports with win-loss records) in both 2017-18 and 2018-19. A year ago, UCF joined Florida State, Oklahoma State and Texas in accomplishing that feat—but the Knights were the only athletic program to repeat that distinction in 2018-19. Minnesota and North Texas also joined UCF in producing all winning team records in 2018-19.
--A perfect 1000 score for the UCF women's tennis team led the way in another impressive performance by Knights athletic squads in the latest annual Academic Progress Rate data released by the NCAA. The women's tennis program achieved a 1000 multi-year score for the eighth straight year, joining the Knights' football team (987) in also earning NCAA Public Recognition Awards for ranking in the top 10 percent of APR for their sports. Five UCF programs--men's golf, women’s golf, women’s soccer, women's tennis and women's volleyball--had single-year scores of 1000 for 2017-18. Seven Knight programs—football, men’s golf, men’s soccer, women’s golf, women’s soccer, women's tennis and women's volleyball—either equaled or improved their single-year APR score from a year ago.
--UCF student-athletes combined for a 3.24 grade-point average for the 2019 spring semester, marking the 23rd consecutive semester at 3.0 or better for Knight teams on a combined basis.
--UCF football coach Josh Heupel (a former All-America quarterback at Oklahoma) made the ballot of 78 players for the National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame.
--UCF in 2018 ranked seventh nationally in “fill rate” in terms of filling seats for home football game at Spectrum Stadium with a 99.6 percent figure. The only facilities that rated higher were those at Nebraska, Oklahoma, Michigan, Utah, Georgia and Alabama—with the first four of those listed at or above 100 percent.
--UCF ranked second nationally—and was one of only four schools to receive an “A” grade—in terms of the number of women coaching women’s Knights athletic teams. With seven women among the nine UCF women’s program head coaches, UCF on a percentage basis ranked behind only Cincinnati, with Washington and Oklahoma the only other schools receiving “A” grades. The data comes from the 2018-19 Women in College Coaching Report Card produced by the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.