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A + Athletes
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Boise State produced four Western Athletic Conference Champions during the current academic year. With the outdoor track season wrapping up next weekend the total count could easily raise to six when all is said and done. A Fiesta Bowl Champion football team is icing on the cake. That is, until the WAC announced the Broncos have taken a stronghold in a new area – the classroom.
On May 1, the WAC released the results from its
multi-year study, the Academic Performance Ratings, which compiled academic scores for every participating member in the conference. The scores are a product of eligibility and retention for each scholarship athlete on a given team.
Each team at the university was assessed and three BSU teams prevailed as the best in the WAC. The football team and both the men’s and women’s basketball teams scored higher than any other team in the WAC for the three-year span that the scores were tallied. The men’s tennis team finished tied for first place.
“This is a very impressive rating,” BSU President Robert Kustra said. “The APR system is relatively new and now that we have a three-year database it’s really important and impressive to see the increase in the APR rate each year during these first three years.”
The impressive academic accolades didn’t stop with the APR. The 2005-06 overall grade-point-average for all BSU student-athletes was recorded at an all-time high of 2.94.
There were also no Bronco teams that will face any sort of academic penalties, which means no scholarships will be taken away.
“In recruiting, again, I think when [coaches] recruit I think they are careful to recruit not only the best athletes, but athletes who have proven themselves to be good students,” Kustra said.
“I’ve heard coaches say that they veered away from students who they thought really weren’t able to make the academic commitment you have to make at Boise State.”
But the success can’t just come from recruiting good students.
There has to be something in place to ensure the education continues once on campus.
Enter the academic support program.
Click here to listen to Arbiter Sports Editor, Jake Garcin interview Bob Kustra, BSU President
“We have a great academic support program here in the athletic program,” Kustra said. “It’s funded well. It’s staffed well – with Gabe Rosenthal serving as the head of it. It’s just a really good academic program. Student athletes, given their incredible schedules, really need an organized approach to their studies and the Academic Support Program provides that.”
The Academic Support Program offers tutoring and study hall
schedules to help keep student-athletes on track, despite their busy schedules. In fact, it seems to be working so well Kustra even admitted it is an advantage student-athletes have over regular students on campus.
“If you take a look at the graduation rate among our athletes, it’s often times better than our non-athletes,” Kustra said. “That suggests to me that the support they’re given is a model for how we need to treat all of our students.”
Providing help for more than 15,000 students isn’t quite as easy as providing for the number of student-athletes at BSU, however. The smaller group of students is a big reason why the Academic Support Program can show such good results. What is important to Kustra, however, is that it provides a system to follow for the rest of the university.
“We’re in the process of doing that,” Kustra said. “We’re improving the orientation program. We’re improving the first year experience. We’ve initiated an early warning system for our regular students. So when something goes wrong we catch their problem early enough. That’s exactly what the academic support system does.”
The BSU administration can continue to hang its hat on the success of the student-athletes and the continuous improvement of the university’s overall academics.
“I think as we continue to improve the overall quality of our students that helps the athletic department increase its quality,” Kustra said. “And more important our recruit students, who, maybe 10 or 15 years ago would have said ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go to the University of Arizona because that’s the kind of quality I’m thinking about.’”
After winning the Fiesta Bowl, Head Football Coach Chris Petersen said he wasn’t going to recruit different athletes just because there is more interest in the program.
His philosophy continues to be to recruit the same type of kids that “got you there.”
“[The coaches] walk the campus to check to make sure their student-athletes are in school,” Kustra said. “Now they aren’t 100 percent successful, but I’m confident that when you look at this APR rate this has something to do with the fact that these coaches are absolutely dedicated to it.”
Jake Garcin
