RICHMOND, Va.—Academic award winners were announced by the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) on Thursday afternoon and Villanova earned Team Academic Excellence recognition in both football and rowing for the 2017-18 academic year.  It is the second straight year that each team has garnered this honor for their academic performance. 
 
Beginning with the 2016-17 academic year, the CAA began recognizing collective performances in the classroom with the CAA Team Academic Excellence Award.  The award recognizes the institution with the highest team grade point average in each of the 22 sports sponsored by the conference.  The team GPA is a calculation of the grade point average of each student-athlete who appeared on an institution's roster throughout the final day of their respective championship seasons.
 
Earlier this year both football and rowing were among the Villanova record 18 teams to earn NCAA public recognition awards from the NCAA.  They each ranked in the top 10 percent of their sport nationwide based on their multi-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores, and the Wildcats led all Division I schools with the highest percentage of its teams earning public recognition awards.  The football team was one of just two CAA Football schools to achieve this distinction, while the rowing team was a public recognition award winner for the sixth straight year. 
 
Villanova announced its own academic data at the end of the Spring 2018 semester and the elite status of Wildcats student-athletes in their academic pursuits continues to exceed even the loftiest of standards.  More than 550 student-athletes from 24 varsity sports programs combined for a 3.322 spring semester GPA, a new athletic record and also the 30^th straight semester spanning the last 15 academic years in which student-athletes have had a GPA of 3.0 or higher.  On a team level, there were 23 sports programs who earned a GPA of 3.0 or higher for the spring semester.