Doug Stibel Press Conference Transcript – Ohio State Buckeyes
10/30/2007 12:00:00 AM | General, Men's Gymnastics
COACH STIBEL: Hello. We just wanted to announce the celebration for the men’s gymnastics team for being recognized as the 2007 NCAA academic champs. Every year, all the teams in the colleges that have gymnastics would compile the team GPAs at the end of the year and we rank them out. This year, we won the championship. We had a 3.4 GPA, beat out Stanford for the first time, Stanford had the streak for four years in a row, so this is the first time for Ohio State to receive this award.
It’s the first time a Big Ten team has won it, and only four other schools or three other schools have won it, one being Stanford, William & Mary and MIT, so we’re extremely proud of our guys to be ranked in there with schools like that, obviously very good academic schools and just part of our program and the support Ohio State gives our student athletes, they were able to achieve that, so we’re very proud of these guys and want to invite everybody to come out and celebrate and join us.
We’ve got some good guest speakers coming out. President Gordon Gee is going to speak at it, our athletic director, Gene Smith, along with Miles and some of our former athletes will be out there speaking, so we’d like the community, all the people at the Ohio State University to come out and join us in celebrating this great achievement that these guys have achieved. Any questions?
REPORTER: How much more rewarding is something like that when you guys are on top of your game athletically as well?
COACH STIBEL: It’s extremely rewarding because not only are these guys great athletes, but achieving in the classroom. The way we run our program, we talk about academics a lot with our guys and we push them to achieve as much in the classroom that equals what they do in the gym, so just the effort the guys do for the class work and achieve that outside of the gym is amazing, so we’re extremely proud of the guys.
REPORTER: So the parameters are you had to win the National Championship, is that it?
COACH STIBEL: What they do is compile the team GPA and we send them in and the collegiate gymnastics association compiles a list off the highest GPAs and we had a 3.4 GPA cumulative and Stanford was at a 3.36 and they were second place this year.
