WALLA WALLA, Wash. -- The Whitman College men's tennis team is one of seven NAIA schools from around the nation to receive 1997-98 academic honors from the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA), the governing body of collegiate tennis.
The ITA presents its All-Academic Team award to tennis squads that achieve a combined grade point average of 3.2 or above on a 4.0 scale.
In addition to its team award, the Whitman men's team led the NAIA in the number of individual players who qualified for ITA Scholar-Athlete All-American awards. Four Whitman players -- juniors Ryan Cooper, Clifford Mah, Akshay Shetty and Haroon Ullah -- qualified for the individual award by maintaining grade point averages of 3.5 or higher.
A total of 51 NAIA players nationwide earned ITA Academic All-American awards, and two schools, Cedarville (Ohio) College and Milligan (Tennessee) College, had three players each qualify for the honor.
To earn Academic All-American honors, players must also be a varsity letter winner and either a junior or senior in school.
"Eleven of the 12 players on our roster played at least one varsity match and were included in the team's overall grade point average," Whitman coach Jeff Northam said. "The academic standards at Whitman are very high, among the highest in the nation, but we also had two other juniors who were close to qualifying for individual honors."
Ullah and Shetty, two of the four Whitman players who earned Academic All-American awards, won the Northwest Conference doubles championship two years ago as freshmen. They placed second in the conference doubles title chase as sophomores and advanced to the semifinals last spring. Ullah, a politics major, is a 1995 graduate of Richland (Wash.) High School. Shetty, an economics major, came to Whitman from Bombay, India.
Mah and Cooper, Whitman's other two Scholar-Athlete winners, are from western Oregon and western Washington, respectively. Mah, a chemistry-biology major, is a 1995 graduate of Benson High School in Portland, Ore. Cooper, an economics major, is a 1995 graduate of Everett (Wash.) High School.
Despite a series of injuries to key players, Ullah included, the Whitman men won seven of 13 Northwest Conference dual matches last spring and placed fourth in the 10-team conference championships tournament. Shetty made the all-conference team.
Northam expects to field a stronger men's team in the spring of 1999, when Whitman and other Northwest Conference schools will compete as members of NCAA Div. III rather than the NAIA.
"We're going to have a great schedule," Northam said. "We'll be hosting two NCAA Division I schools as well as the University of California-Santa Cruz, the defending Division III national champion. The competition will be tough, but we're going to have a good team, a very solid team with a lot of depth."