Pima sets school record with 99 NJCAA All-Academic honorees
Pima Community College Athletics set a school record with 99 student-athletes earning NJCAA All-Academic honors for 2025-26, and 10 of the college’s 11 teams reached team recognition at the same time. The department said the 10 honored teams combined for a 3.30 GPA, a mark that put Pima across the NJCAA’s team-academic threshold and into a rare department-wide showing.
The breadth of the list mattered as much as the total. Women’s Cross Country led the way with a 3.62 team GPA, followed by Women’s Track & Field at 3.54 and Men’s Track & Field and Softball at 3.36. Women’s Basketball posted a 3.34 GPA, while Men’s Basketball finished at 3.00, right at the cutoff required for NJCAA team academic recognition. The rest of the honored teams were Men’s Cross Country at 3.32, Baseball at 3.25, Men’s Soccer at 3.22 and Women’s Soccer at 3.21.
For NJCAA basketball, the numbers point to more than one strong locker room. Both Pima basketball programs were part of the department-wide academic surge, which suggests the support structure around the roster extends beyond the court and into daily classwork, eligibility monitoring and degree progress. Men’s Basketball clearing the threshold at 3.00 and Women’s Basketball going higher at 3.34 put both programs inside the same academic standard as the school’s top-performing teams.
Pima said 47 of the 99 honorees came from Southern Arizona, with additional student-athletes from Cochise and Central Arizona also included. That regional spread is part of what makes junior-college basketball significant in Tucson and across the state: the same pipeline that supplies lineups also supplies the classroom record. The NJCAA Academic Student-Athlete Awards are divided into first-, second- and third-team distinctions based on GPA, while team honors require at least a 3.0 average.
The record also shows how far Pima has climbed in this category. In 2020, the program had 33 student-athletes on NJCAA All-Academic teams, a much smaller total than the 99 named this year. The latest count gives Pima a department-wide academic profile that reaches well beyond one roster and puts both basketball teams inside a larger standard of accountability.