Brooke Andrews '01 is the first Ithacan ever to win the Academic All-American of the Year Award. By Amy Ward As you can imagine, academic all-American teams are filled with impressive college students who successfully combine stellar athletic careers with enviable academic records. For example, this year’s Women’s At-Large Academic All-America Team, which includes 45 athletes from seven sports, features 14 athletes who maintained a grade point average of 4.0. To be named the academic all-American of the year, then, would require a student-athlete to stand out even among a field of standouts. Graduating with a GPA above 4.0, being a three-time all-American, and leading her team to its most successful season ever meant that lacrosse team goalie and cocaptain Brooke Andrews ’01 stood out quite nicely --- which is why she received this great honor, the first ever for an Ithacan. For the Groton, Massachusetts, native, the feat capped a career full of awards, honors, and recognition that culminated this spring at the quarterfinals of the NCAA playoffs. Andrews helped the Bombers to the NCAA playoffs twice; as a freshman she started 10 times for a team that finished 11-7 and lost to Trinity College (Connecticut) in the first round of the playoffs. The next two years Ithaca participated in the Eastern College Athletic Conference playoffs, reaching the finals in 1999 and winning the title a year later. This spring’s team entered the season with a goal Andrews describes as "big-game hunting." She explains, "We were looking to knock off teams like Hamilton and Cortland, who are continually top-ranked in New York." An upset of seventh-ranked Hamilton in April helped to jump-start a nine-game winning streak that saw the Bombers win the Empire Eight championship (finishing 7-0 in conference play) and claim the New York State Women’s Collegiate Athletic Association post season tournament, beating 10th-ranked Cortland in the finals. "Winning the state tournament was a great victory," Andrews says. "The past few years we had lost in earlier rounds to teams we thought we could beat, so this year we not only got to beat Cortland in the postseason but also got a first-place trophy." Andrews was in goal as Ithaca opened the NCAA playoffs. When the Bombers rallied from a 7-2 halftime deficit to beat St. Mary’s (Maryland), they earned the program’s first NCAA tournament win. Although Ithaca lost 13-6 in the quarterfinals to second-ranked Amherst, Andrews says it was an amazing season. "When you lose to the team that played the national championship game into overtime, you have to give yourself some respect," she says. "Everyone performed above expectations and understood the team concept." While Andrews’s on-field résumé grew (she was the first Ithaca goaltender to earn all-American honors, this year she was named the Empire Eight player of the year, and she set school records for saves in a season and career), her grades were hardly suffering. Andrews was 1 of just 23 students in the 1,318-member class of 2001 to graduate with a GPA above 4.0. Not only was Andrews faced with the inherent challenges that all college student-athletes deal with in balancing sports with classes, but her major --- athletic training --- requires 800 hours of clinical experience, including work with sports teams during two of the three seasons each year. Because of that commitment, most athletic training majors can’t participate in intercollegiate sports after their sophomore year. The cooperation of Coach Piep van Heuven and Ithaca’s athletic trainers was key to Andrews’s success. "As an athlete and as an athletic trainer, I obviously had to work on my time-management skills. The athletic trainers gave me a fall and winter sport so that I could have the spring free to play lacrosse." She did miss the team’s six-week fall season, and during the Bombers’ preseason she was lucky to make two or three of the six weekly practices while working as a student athletic trainer with the track and field programs. Van Heuven, who was herself an all-region goalie as an undergraduate athlete at Bates College in Maine, admires Andrews’s determination: "From the beginning, she always set a high standard for herself. She has had the same seriousness of purpose in the goal and off-field sense of fun, from her first start in her freshmen year through her last game as a north-south all-star at Johns Hopkins in June." The next step in Andrews’s career has begun already. She’s an athletic training intern at Colgate for the up coming school year. "Being at a Division I school with high-caliber athletes will be a lot of fun for nine months," she says. "It will give me greater experience as an athletic trainer in the working world; I hope it will help clarify what I want to study in grad school --- whether it’s athletic training, something related to athletic training, a physician assistant program, or maybe something entirely different." Photos by Tim McKinney
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A. Ozolins, Ithaca College Office of Publications, 27. Nov. 2001