More Lofty Academic Honors Announced for Montana Grizzly Athletes

The impressive GPA hits just keep on coming for the Griz.

This time around, the University of Montana men's basketball team has been spotlighted. An "Honors Court" sounds like a pretty cool accomplishment.

Jackson Wagner with UM Sports Information tells us today (Thursday) that the Griz  basketball team received the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) Team Academic Excellence Award. There were also seven student-athletes named to the NABC Honors Court, which is a new program record.

The Team Excellence Award recognizes programs that finished with a team GPA of 3.0 or higher in 2022-23. The Honors Court includes junior, senior, and graduate students who finished the school year with a cumulative GPA of 3.2 or higher. This is the fourth straight year that Montana has been recognized as a team, and the sixth time in the previous eight years.

Head basketball coach Travis DeCuire, who also played for the Griz in the 1990s, was quoted as saying, “It’s a big deal for us. I take a lot of pride in being able to say we’ve graduated 100 percent of our seniors. And hopefully we can continue with this kind of success off the court.”

The Grizzlies finished the 2022-23 school year with a team GPA of 3.36, easily qualifying for the award. They improved from a 3.22 GPA last year. The Honors Court consists of returning players Aanen Moody, Josh Vazquez, and Laolu Oke. Former Grizzlies Josh Bannan (turned professional), Mack Anderson (used up eligibility), and Trey Lawrence and Jonathon Brown (transferred) were also honored.

It's more icing on the academic cake for the Griz. Earlier this week, we shared the news that UM won three of the 14 newly-established Big Sky Conference Team Academic Champions awards. The new Team Academic Champions award goes to the program with the highest GPA over the previous academic year in each Big Sky sport.

Winning the award in their respective sports were Montana's football, men's tennis and softball programs.

Congrats to all those student athletes who piled on an outstanding "Griz" Point Average!