Kesha Champion Receives Senior Athletic Award
4/29/2008 8:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
April 29, 2008
LEWISBURG, Pa. - Bucknell senior Kesha Champion (Chesapeake, Va./Indian River), the 2008 Patriot League Tournament MVP and a member of the Bison women's basketball team, received a special award at the University's annual Senior Athletic Awards Banquet, sponsored by the Bison Club and held in Sojka Pavilion on Tuesday, April 29.
Champion won the Bradley N. Tufts Award, presented to senior athletes "in recognition of exceptional athletic achievement and contribution to Bucknell athletics." Champion shared the award with Joey Kuterbach of the men's soccer team, who was the male selection.
In addition to Champion, several other student-athletes were honored at the banquet, including the winners of the Christy Mathewson Award, given to the most outstanding athletes in the senior class.
Champion completed an outstanding career at Bucknell winning the Patriot League Tournament MVP and leading the Bison to their first Patriot League title and NCAA appearance since 2002 in March. She averaged 10.5 points, 4.3 rebounds and 3.9 assists per game as a senior. Her 126 assists are seventh on the Bison single-season list, while she wrapped up her career with 361, the third-most in program history.
In the Patriot League championship game at Holy Cross, Champion netted her 1,000th career point, becoming the 17th player in Bison history to reach that milestone. She wrapped up her career with 1,016 points to rank tied for 16th in program annals.
Champion played in all 120 games over her four-year career and started every one of them. She broke Bucknell's record for career starts and consecutive starts as well as the standard for games played, which she shares with classmate Hope Foster.
Bucknell is a highly-selective, privately endowed liberal arts institution with an enrollment of approximately 3,400 undergraduate students. Bucknell competes in NCAA Division I as a member of the Patriot League and has full membership along with American, Army, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, Lehigh and Navy. Bucknell has won the Presidents' Cup, signifying the Patriot League's all-sports champion, in 13 of 17 years, including nine of the last 10.
Recently, 17 Bison programs - the seventh-most in Division I - earned NCAA Public Recognition for having Academic Performance Rates in the top 10 percent nationally in their respective sport. In addition, Bucknell ranks fifth in Division I in the total number of CoSIDA Academic All-America selections, with 114 national Academic All-Americans since 1970.