TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - The 2010-11 Indiana State women's basketball team ranked sixth in the nation in academics this past season as announced by the Women's Basketball Coaches Association, compiling a 3.518 grade-point average in the classroom.

The honor is nothing new to the Sycamore women's basketball program, which will enter its second season under head coach Teri Moren this fall. Indiana State has won the WBCA's Team Top 25 Honor Roll National Championship three times and this marks the 10^th consecutive season that the Sycamores have appeared in the WBCA's Top 25. Indiana State topped the list in 2003, 2005 and 2009. The Sycamores have placed in the Top 13 on the WBCA's Honor Roll rankings in each of the last 10 years and have been in the top six a total of nine times over that same time frame.

South Dakota State earned the WBCA Team GPA National Championship with 3.666 mark while Bucknell was second with a 3.632 team GPA. ISU was one of three schools from the Missouri Valley Conference in the rankings, joining Creighton (4^th - 3.527) and Evansville (24^th - 3.340).

Individually, the Sycamores placed two members of the 2010-11 squad on the MVC's All-Academic Team, with senior Kelsie Cooley earning first team honors with rising senior Shannon Thomas receiving honorable mention status. During the season, Cooley also earned Capital One Academic All-District V with Thomas picking up a pair of Scholar-Athlete of the Week selections.

"With the increased importance and scrutiny of the APR (academic progress rate) in the landscape of intercollegiate athletics, these remarkable teams are setting the bar for academic excellence," said WBCA CEO Beth Bass. "Congratulations to all these STUDENT-athletes and their coaches."

A team's GPA is calculated by dividing the total number of quality points earned by the total number of hours attempted by all team members in the academic terms (semesters or quarters) that the season spans. Weighted grades are converted to a 4.0 scale. The GPAs are rounded to the nearest thousandth of a point. Teams are nominated for the honor by a WBCA-member head coach. A team must have a 3.000 or better GPA to be nominated.

NCAA Division I Rankings