Snow College sets school record with 123 academic honorees

Snow College placed 123 student-athletes on NJCAA All-Academic teams in a July 30 athletics release, and the Badgers called it a school record. The recognition covered the entire athletic department, even though the post sat under football, which makes it a basketball story too: at the junior-college level, the programs that keep players eligible are the ones best positioned to keep rosters intact.

The NJCAA splits academic honors into three tiers, with First Team reserved for a 4.0 GPA, Second Team for 3.80 to 3.99, and Third Team for 3.60 to 3.79. Across the association, 12,245 student-athletes earned All-Academic honors for the 2023-24 school year, so Snow College’s 123 honorees landed in a national field that is broad, competitive and unforgiving about classroom standards.

The number also shows a clear climb in Ephraim. Snow College had 96 student-athletes earn NJCAA All-Academic recognition in 2024, and the move to 123 this year pushed the department to a new level of depth. That matters in a program built on one- and two-year pieces, where every saved eligibility season can change a basketball roster and every missed class can cost a coach a rotation player.

For Snow College’s basketball programs, the academic infrastructure is part of the product. Karen Johnson runs the athletic department, while Andrew May leads the men’s program and Zuleika Grinsell heads the women’s team. Those jobs are not just about Xs and Os in Ephraim, Utah, at 150 College Ave.; they also depend on tutoring, eligibility tracking and the kind of day-to-day accountability that keeps players on schedule when travel, practice and classes collide.

That is the real value of the 123-honoree mark. In NJCAA basketball, a roster is only as strong as the players who can stay on it, and Snow College just put a school-record number of athletes into the academic column that keeps seasons alive.