ATLANTA - The Indiana State women's basketball team finished fourth in the annual Women's Basketball Coaches Association Academic Team Top 25 Honor Roll for the 2009-10 academic year. The Sycamores team GPA of 3.508 was good enough for fourth nationally and topped the Missouri Valley Conference's three teams that were mentioned.

The honor is nothing new to the Sycamore women's basketball program, who are under the leadership of first-year head coach Teri Moren. Indiana State has won the WBCA's Team Top 25 Honor Roll National Championship three times and this marks the ninth consecutive season that the Sycamores have appeared in the WBCA's Top 25. Indiana State topped the list in 2003, 2005 as well as 2009. The Sycamores have placed in the Top 13 on the WBCA's Honor Roll rankings in each of the last nine years and have been in the top four a total of eight times over that same time frame.

"It is very unique that the Sycamore women's basketball program has been honored so frequently over the past nine seasons," Moren commented. "Our team works extremely hard in the classroom, which is not only one of the things that the coaching staff emphasizes but our student-athletes also take a great sense of pride in continuing the tradition of academic excellence that this program has established. I'm looking forward to seeing the dedication that the team has displayed in the classroom carry over to the court this season."

Utah Valley earned the WBCA Team GPA National Championship with 3.630 mark while South Dakota State was second with a 3.622 team GPA. ISU was the best of three Missouri Valley Conference schools listed in the top 7 as ISU's fourth place finish was followed up by Creighton's 3.506 mark (fifth) as well as UNI's seventh place finish with a team GPA of 3.464.

Notably, when the Sycamores won the 2003 WBCA Team GPA National Championship, the team also led the NCAA is scoring. It is still the only time in the history of NCAA Division I Women's Basketball that a team has paced the nation in scoring and team GPA in the same season.

Leading the way for the Sycamores in the class room last season was senior Kelsey Luna who earned ESPN The Magazine First Team Academic All-America honors this past spring. Additionally, she repeated as the Prairie Farm's Missouri Valley Conference Scholar-Athlete of the Year, becoming the first student-athlete in the history of the conference to do so. Luna is the fifth Sycamore to earn the league's top scholar-athlete honor. With her ESPN The Magazine Academic All-America honor, Luna also continued an unprecedented string of success for the Sycamores both in the classroom and on the court as it marked the fifth consecutive season in which at least one Sycamore was honored by the College Sports Information Directors of America for academic and athletic achievement.

"Congratulations to these teams who have excelled academically during the 2009-10 school year," WBCA CEO Beth Bass said. "Each of these coaches set an extraordinary example for their peers to follow by holding academics in such high esteem with their student-athletes."

GPAs are calculated by dividing the total number of quality points earned by each student-athlete on an institution's roster in the given academic terms by the total number of hours earned by the team. The GPAs are rounded to the nearest thousandth of a point. Per a motion passed by the WBCA Board of Directors in 2007, teams making the list of Academic Top 25 Team Honor Roll must obtain at least a 3.000 overall GPA.

Founded in 1981, the WBCA promotes women's basketball by unifying coaches at all levels to develop a reputable identity for the sport and to foster and promote the development of the game as a sport for women and girls. For additional information about the WBCA, please visit wbca.org.

NCAA Division I
Utah Valley University is appearing on the WBCA Academic Top 25 Team Honor Roll for the fourth time. 2009-10 marks the first year that the Wolverines secured the top spot amongst NCAA Division I institutions. Aside from its classroom successes, Utah Valley University finished the season with a record of 10-22 and were the Great West Tournament champions.

The WBCA Academic Top 25 Team Honor Roll for NCAA Division I is as follows: