BATON ROUGE — LSU senior Ivana Kuzmic earned honorable mention All-America honors as announced by the America Volleyball Coaches Association on Wednesday.
The AVCA All-America team consisted of 12 players on each of the first, second and third teams and 64 players named honorable mention selections. She becomes the first Tiger to be honored as an All-American since Angie Miller was a first-team selection and Daniela Reis earned second team honors in 1992.
An All-South Region selection and first-team All-SEC honoree, Kuzmic led the team with 1.71 blocks per game, the second best in the SEC and seventh most in the NCAA. In addition, the middle blocker led the team and ranked sixth in the SEC with a .342 hitting percentage and also averaged 2.28 kills per game. Against Kentucky, she became the first player to wear an LSU uniform to record 700 career blocks, while also racking up over 1,000 career kills.
The LSU career and single-season record holder for blocks per game, she ranked third in single-season block assists and seventh in total blocks this year. In her two seasons with the Tigers after transferring from Arkansas-Little Rock, she posted a total of eight double-figure blocking matches, including four in each season, becoming the first player to achieve that feat at LSU since the 1985-86 seasons.
Earlier this season against Campbell, she recorded a school record .923 hitting percentage, posting 12 kills with no errors on 13 attempts. It tied her for the 22nd best single-match mark in NCAA history. She went on to earn Most Valuable Player honors in the three-day Georgia Southern Invitational.
She was named the SEC Defensive Player of the Week on three occasions and the SEC Player of the Week once this season. She garnered more SEC Defensive Player of the Week honors than any other player in the league this season. In addition, she was honored with more individual SEC weekly awards than any other non-freshman player in the league this season, behind only Tiger freshman Marina Skender, who earned five honors, including four Freshman of the Week marks.
This is the first All-American honor of Kuzmic’s career after she earned the first AVCA All-Region honor of her career. In 2004, she earned honorable mention All-South Region honors.