List of Academic All-America Recipients
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — University of New Mexico track & field student-athletes Alice Wright and Daniel Lam were named Thursday to the 2017-18 Google Cloud Academic All-America Track & Field/Cross Country First Team.
Selected by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA), Wright earned her third straight Academic All-America recognition, while Lam collected his first such honor.
The duo is the fifth and sixth Academic All-America selections for New Mexico Athletics in the 2017-18 academic year and continues a 17-year streak of multiple Academic All-America selections for UNM as a whole.
They also mark the 15th and 16th Academic All-America selections for the Lobo track & field/cross country program in its history, and the 10th and 11th first-team selections in the last five seasons.
The Lobos’ 11 First-Team Academic All-America selections since 2014 are the most in Division I in that span, with no other program owning more than eight.
Wright, hailing from Worcester, England, owns a GPA of 4.04 in her pursuit of a graduate degree in business administration. A four-time Academic All-District honoree, Wright has claimed her third straight First-Team Academic All-American nod.
She is the only Lobos in university history to earn three First-Team Academic All-America selections.
Wright is also an eight-time All-American athletically, with four honors in outdoor track and four in cross country.
This past November, Wright was the 14th-place finisher at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, helping UNM to its second NCAA team title in the last three years. She also qualified to the NCAA Indoor Track & Field Championships in March.
At the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships earlier in June, Wright became the first female athlete in NCAA history to be All-American in the 10,000 at four straight championships. Additionally, she’s the first female athlete in Mountain West and UNM history to be a four-time All-American in any event at the NCAA Outdoor Championships.
Academically, she was named Academic All-Mountain West and MW Scholar-Athlete from 2014-17 and earned a fourth straight USTFCCCA All-Academic honor in February as part of the NCAA Division I Women’s Scholar Team of the Year.
Lam, an Amsterdam, Netherlands, product, carried a 4.16 GPA as he earned his degree in business administration. He was a three-time Academic All-Mountain West and Mountain West Scholar Athlete honoree, earning those merits from 2015-17.
He finished his New Mexico career as the 2018 Mountain West heptathlon champion, and was the MW heptathlon runner-up in 2016 and the MW decathlon runner-up in 2016, 2017 and 2018. He was a five-time All-MW honoree and ranks second in UNM history in the heptathlon and seventh in the decathlon.
Lam finished the 2018 indoor season ranked 36th in NCAA in the heptathlon.
For UNM as a whole, Wright and Lam join women’s skiing’s Katharine Irwin, women’s basketball’s Cherise Beynon and men’s soccer’s Simon Spangenberg and Jason Beaulieu as Google Cloud Academic All-America selections for the 2017-18 academic year.
All six student-athletes were first team selections.
Wright and Lam are the 110th and 111th Academic All-America selections in UNM history (dating back to 1968), with 81 of those coming in the last 17 years.
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