BATON ROUGE – The Tiger Athletic Foundation hosts its Academic Excellence Gala each year to honor LSU’s student-athletes who pursue excellence both on and off the field, and for the third year in a row, the LSU soccer program was honored as the recipient of the prestigious Tiger Cup for performance on the field, in the classroom and in the community.
This year’s TAF Academic Excellence Gala was held on Sunday evening at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center as members from each of LSU’s 19 varsity sports were honored during the festivities.
The recipient of the Tiger Cup is determined by combining a team’s final conference and national ranking with its performance on the field along with its cumulative team grade-point average and community service hours accumulated off the field during the previous academic year.
This marks the third-straight year in which members of the LSU soccer program were honored as winners of the Tiger Cup at the TAF Academic Excellence Gala after also receiving the award in 2009 and 2010.
While earning a trip to the SEC Tournament semifinals for the fourth-straight season this past fall, players from the LSU soccer team racked up more than 735 community service hours to rank No. 1 among all men’s and women’s athletic programs at LSU, as well as a 3.085 cumulative team grade-point average for the previous academic season. The team’s 735 community service hours for the year equals an average of 30.65 community service hours completed per player.
“We are very honored as a program to receive the Tiger Cup again this year,” said LSU head coach Brian Lee. “Our student-athletes have a tremendous support system around them that really helps them excel on the field, in the classroom and in the community during their careers here at LSU.
“From the day they join our program, we teach our student-athletes our philosophy of pursuing excellence both on and off the field and challenge them to be the very best they can be.”
In addition to winning the Tiger Cup as a team for the third-straight year, 10 members of the soccer squad where honored for their academic performance as recipients of the LSU Director’s Cup, including Courtney Alexander, Carlie Banks, Allysha Chapman, Natalie Ieyoub, Hannah Jobe, Katherine Lagow, Kellie Murphy, Amy Porter, Chelsea Potts and Alex Ramsey.