According to Kristie Beitz, senior associate athletics director for academic affairs, there are four pillars for student-athlete success.
“At Liberty University, we do a fantastic job of helping our student-athletes grow academically, athletically, socially, and spiritually,” she said. “It definitely sets us apart from other institutions because we want to ensure that whole-person development.”
Beitz said that being a student-athlete is the equivalent of balancing two full-time jobs.
“First, you must be a student, and then you must be an athlete,” Beitz said. “You can never reverse the order.”
She compares building a well-rounded student-athlete to constructing a new facility in Liberty’s ever-changing academic and athletic landscape.
“With our academic enhancement program, we have truly taken the opportunity to dive in and invest in each one of our student-athletes,” Beitz said. “It’s kind of like all of the buildings that you see here on campus. There’s a lot of scaffolding, but as the building starts to go up, the scaffolding is removed. When our student-athletes come to our campus, we provide a tremendous amount of support to help them be successful. As they move through their years here, we remove some of those supports to help them stand on their own two feet and be really successful on their own.”
The results speak for themselves. In 2011, Liberty became the 13th school in the country to earn the National Association of Academic Advisors (N4A) Program Certification, demonstrating that its academic support unit has the knowledge, practices, and procedures in place to help student-athletes stay on track to graduate. Over the last five years, Liberty Athletics has met or exceeded NCAA standards as defined by the Academic Progress Rate (APR) initiative.
For the 2014-15 academic year, 17 out of 20 teams in Liberty’s NCAA Division I Athletics program boasted overall GPAs of 3.0 or better, with 34 student-athletes maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA. For the fifth straight year, the average cumulative GPA rose, to an all-time high of 3.14.
“Our student-athletes are not only winning championships on the field of competition, but they are also winning in the classroom,” Beitz said, noting that positive results in academics and athletics often go hand-in-hand.
“Our women’s tennis program had the best season on record on the court, and then when you look and see what they did in the classroom, it’s absolutely fantastic,” Beitz said, noting that the team maintained an average GPA of 3.89 last fall, raising its cumulative GPA for the year to 3.65. “Field hockey was at 3.58 cumulatively, and volleyball was at 3.43, so it’s really, really exciting to see.”
University adopts new tool to enhance learning
This summer, Liberty became the first Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) school in the country to partner with APTUS Discovery. This academic service provides a 30-minute interactive personal assessment using tablet technology and behavioral science, evaluating how student-athletes learn, both on the field and in the classroom.
“It’s something that’s cutting-edge, something that shows the investment Liberty University has made as an institution to help our student-athletes achieve success in every area of their lives,” said Beitz.
A total of 150 student-athletes — 87 incoming freshmen and transfers who arrived early and all of Liberty’s returning football and men’s and women’s basketball players — took the assessment. The results were enlightening.
“The APTUS results help you assess your attention, your grit, your competitiveness, your self-control, and how that translates onto the field of competition and into the classroom,” Beitz said.
For Fall 2015, Liberty has hired an APTUS coordinator to develop academic and athletic improvement plans using the assessment data.
“The assessment provides a variety of different benchmarks and learning strategies that help you to be successful academically and athletically, because it takes behavioral and cognitive sciences and puts them together,” Beitz said. “Student-athletes are learning their strengths, their setbacks, and their strategies, and we’re communicating this information to their coaches, to their professors, to the academic staff, and to the tutorial staff who works with them.”
Smart stats
In 2014-15, five Liberty student-athletes — Alex Close (baseball), Mitch Hanson (football), Ashley Rininger (women’s basketball), Megan Robinson (softball), and John Sherret (track & field) — were awarded the nation’s highest academic distinction for collegiate athletes: Capital One Academic All-American. Also, for the first time in Liberty Athletics history, three student-athletes — Matt Pennington (baseball), Megan Robinson (softball), and Brittany Yang (women’s tennis) — were awarded the George A. Christenberry Award for academic excellence, the highest academic honor for Big South Conference (BSC) student-athletes. Liberty holds the BSC record with 18 total recipients.
