Bozeman — Montana State University has been recertified by the NCAA for
another 10 years, the university announced today. 

NCAA certification is a once-a-decade event for Division I Athletics
programs, and more than 50 coaches, faculty, students, staff and community
members spent the 2010-11 academic year working on the project.

“This is a review by the NCAA of how our program stacked up against national
benchmarks and we stack up with the best,” said Peter Fields, MSU Athletics
director.

“This certification is a testament to the hard work of our coaches and staff
to have a quality program for our student-athletes at MSU,” Fields said. “It
also shows the integration of athletics into the rest of campus in
everything from recruiting, to mentoring, to the volunteer work our student
athletes do for the community.”

In order to complete the certification process, MSU finished a self-study
that reviewed the university’s governance and commitment to NCAA rules;
academic integrity; gender/diversity issues and student-athlete well-being.

“This was a tremendous effort by committee chair Jim Rimpau and a great many
people to make this process successful – MSU owes all of them a big thank
you for their time,” Fields said.

Rimpau is MSU’s vice president of planning and analysis and its chief
information officer.

MSU Athletics has enjoyed several off-the-field successes recently. Last
semester, its roughly 350 student-athletes had a collective grade point
average of 3.22 – the highest in the Big Sky Conference as calculated by the
league office. More than a dozen Bobcat student-athletes earned national
academic honors during the most recent academic year, and MSU’s women’s
basketball and track and field teams earned national awards for their
academic performance as a unit.