The men’s Indiana basketball program officially announced its 2023 graduating class on Saturday.
Indiana’s 2023 graduating class included: Trayce Jackson-Davis, Xavier Johnson, Miller Kopp, Anthony Leal, Nate Childress and Michael Shipp. Both Xavier Johnson and Anthony Leal are retuning to IU next season.
As graduation weekend wraps up, the IU basketball program also was one of 11 Indiana athletics programs to earn a perfect APR score. The Hoosiers earned a perfect 1,000 APR score for the 2021-22 academic year. That is the most recent data released.
The Indiana basketball program now holds a perfect 1,000 rating for the past four-year average.
Ever since head coach Mike Woodson returned to Indiana, his emphasis on academics hasn’t wavered.
From scheduling practices around final exam study sessions to teaching the importance of academics to his players. Woodson has made it evident; you must be a true student-athlete to play for him.
“It’s vital. A lot of these guys, they’re not going to play NBA basketball, that’s just being realistic,” Woodsons said earlier this year on the Don Fischer radio show. “That’s not to bust anybody’s bubble, but you have to go to school and get an education so you can make sure when it’s all said and done you’ve got something to fall back on and go off in the work place and be able to compete and do what you do.”
That emphasis on academics was shown immediately after Woodson was hired.
One of the first additions he made to his support staff at Indiana was Anitra House. House began tutoring Woodson in 1976 and worked with him throughout the remainder of his Indiana career.
“Anitra was huge for me in terms of tutoring me and my wife Terri on a day-to-day basis, especially to help me get where I needed to go,” Woodson added. “And that’s why she’s back with me now.”
The success of Mike Woodson and the APR score’s are a breathe of fresh air. After the firing of Kelvin Sampson, Tom Crean helped increase the APR scores to near 1,000. But, over the last few years of Crean’s tenure, he saw those numbers drop to 943 in the 2016-17 season.
A program typically needs to hold a four-year average score of 930 to remain eligible for postseason play.
Since APR includes ‘student-athlete eligibility, retention and graduation as factors’, it’ll be interesting to see the development of the scores. The NCAA did recently approve a new change related to transfers, but with the continued one-and-done rule and the very much increasing use of the transfer portal, it’s a metric that will be interesting to follow.
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