Snow College, Central Georgia Tech earn NJCAA academic team honors

Snow College and Central Georgia Technical College turned classwork into a program marker, finishing as the NJCAA’s 2025-26 academic teams of the year in men’s and women’s basketball. Snow earned the men’s honor with a 3.67 GPA, while Central Georgia Tech claimed the women’s distinction with a 3.87 GPA, a mark that sits near the top of the association’s academic ladder.

Those numbers matter because the NJCAA’s academic awards are built around real academic thresholds, not ceremonial recognition. All-Academic honors go to student-athletes with a 3.60 GPA or higher, and Third Team designation covers the 3.60 to 3.79 range. Across the association, 13,915 student-athletes reached that standard, including 672 men and 943 women in basketball. The award structure also places team success in a broader context: 1,347 NJCAA teams finished with a 3.00 GPA or higher in the 2024-25 academic year.

For coaches, those grades are part of roster management. A team like Snow, at 3.67, is not just keeping players eligible, it is building a classroom floor that helps avoid transfers, academic setbacks and midseason availability issues. Central Georgia Tech’s 3.87 goes a step further, showing the kind of day-to-day discipline that can help a women’s program keep players on the floor and in the gym while recruiting prospects who want basketball and academic support in the same place.

Central Georgia Tech’s latest honor also fits a longer pattern. The college posted NJCAA academic honors releases in 2020-21 and again in 2022-23, a record that shows its women’s basketball program has been among the association’s academic standouts before this season’s top national finish. That history gives administrators and recruits something concrete to point to when they talk about culture, because the numbers have held up across multiple cycles.

The NJCAA says each year’s Academic Teams of the Year recognize squads in every sport for classroom dedication, and the full list of 2025-26 honorees is available in a PDF on its site. In a JUCO landscape where player movement is constant and rosters can change quickly, Snow and Central Georgia Tech showed that academic consistency can still be measured, ranked and used as proof that winning programs are built well beyond the scoreboard.