Knights Earn USMC/AVCA Team Academic Award

ORLANDO, Fla. – The UCF volleyball team added to its historic 2021 season as it was named a recipient of the 2021 USMC/AVCA Team Academic Award.

The award, which was initiated in the 1992-93 academic year, honors collegiate and high school volleyball teams that displayed excellence in the classroom during the school year by maintaining at least a 3.30 cumulative team grade-point average on a 4.0 scale or a 4.10 cumulative team GPA on a 5.0 scale. In total, 1,275 teams have earned the USMC/AVCA Team Academic Award for the 2020-21 season. Women's collegiate teams were well represented as over 50% of the membership in all three NCAA divisions won the award, including a new record of 243 division I programs.

"Winning this award 11 of the years I've been here is gratifying because it's in line with who we are as a volleyball program," head coach Todd Dagenais said, "We are an academic program first and conference champions second. We have to give proper credit to Carly Place, our academic advisor, who has set the standard that winning this award is the minimum success rate that we accept in the volleyball program."

The Knights compiled a cumulative GPA of 3.53 for the 2020-21 academic year. UCF was among the nation's top academic-performing programs for the 11th time in program history in 2019. All eleven campaigns have come during the Todd Dagenais era.

The USMC/AVCA Team Academic Award is the single largest award offered by quantity of schools, players and coaches honored. Since the 2000-2001 season, the number of recipients has increased every single year but three, while more than doubling the total over the last eight academic years. Since the award's inception in 1993, the amount of award winners has increased from 62 to last year's number of 1,313.

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