NWCA All-Academic Top 30 Teams | NWCA All-Academic Individuals
STANFORD, Calif. – Four Stanford wrestlers were recognized by the National Wrestling Coaches Association when the organization announced its All-Academic Team, Monday.
Stanford was one of five programs with four selections, joining American, Lehigh, Ohio State and South Dakota State. Penn State led the way with six honorees, while Oklahoma State had five.
As a team, Stanford was 16th overall with a 3.190 GPA. It marked the eighth straight season the Cardinal placed in the top 16 in the nation. Harvard topped the list with a 3.412 team GPA, while Sacred Heart (3.384), Brown (3.360), Duke (3.348) and Kent State (3.325) rounded out the top 5.
Representing Stanford were redshirt junior Peter Galli (science, technology & society), redshirt sophomores Nathan Butler (computer science) and Connor Schram (science, technology & society) and redshirt freshman Paul Fox. Schram (125 pounds) was an All-American and Pac-12 champion in 2015-16, while Butler (285 pounds) was an NCAA qualifier and the runner-up at the conference tournament. Both are being recognized for the second straight year.
Stanford's four honorees makes up half of the picks from the Pac-12 Conference. CSU Bakersfield's Ian Nickell and Reuben Franklin, Arizona State’s Blake Stauffer and Boise State's Geordan Martinez also made the cut.
Awarded annually, the NWCA All-Academic Team contains 116 student-athletes and of those, 36 were All-Americans. One-hundred and one wrestlers on the team qualified for the NCAA Division I Championships, which is an increase of 24 wrestlers compared to the 2013-14 team. The team grade-point average was determined using a system that includes 12 student-athletes from each program. Of the 77 Division I wrestling programs, 52 teams had at least one representative on the All-Academic Team.