ECAC Hockey League Announces Finalists for Women’s Student-Athlete of the Year

ECAC Hockey League Announces Finalists for Women's Student-Athlete of the Year

ALBANY, N.Y. - The ECAC Hockey League will present a new award this season which will recognize the academic achievements of its student-athletes. The Student-Athlete of the Year Award will be presented to one female and one male at their respective end-of season banquets. This year's finalists for the women's award are Sarah Daniel (Calgary, Alb.) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tara French (Truro, N.S.) from Colgate University and Kelsey Johnson (Wayzata, Minn.) from Yale University.

The winner of the women's award will be announced at the league banquet on March 2, as part of the women's championship weekend. Finalists for the men's award will be announced in early March.

Each school was asked to nominate a top scholar athlete who met the following requirements: a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.50 on a 4.00 scale through the fall term; participation in a minimum of 50 percent of the team's contests (33 percent of team's minutes for goaltenders); demonstrated leadership on and off the ice (e.g., character, contributions to the community, participation/involvement in institutional groups/committees, etc.).

The finalists were selected by a committee made up of athletic department and university administrators.

The following bios provide more information on the three finalists:

SARAH DANIEL (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute):

Daniel carries a 3.91 cumulative grade point average as an aeronautical engineering and mechanical engineering dual major. A member of the Student-Athletic Advisory Committee (SAAC) and the Athletic Board, she has been named to the Dean's List in every semester and earned an academic citation for outstanding work in Fundamentals of Flight. She is also a member of the Pi Tau Sigma International Mechanical Engineering Honor Society and a recipient of a Rensselaer Leadership Award. She also volunteers with Learn-to-Skate and as a coach with various youth teams.

The Engineers' captain in each of the last two seasons, Sarah is currently fifth on the team in points with 18. She is second in goals with 11 and has seven assists. A forward, she has played in all 33 games for RPI, and is the program's all-time leader in games played with 113. Sarah has tallied at least one point in 12 games to help RPI post a 12-20-1 record en route to its first-ever Division I post-season appearance in its inaugural ECACHL season.

During her career, Sarah has 52 goals and 39 assists for 91 points in 113 games. She is nine points shy of reaching 100 points in her career, a feat achieved by only six previous players. An ESPN the Magazine Academic All-America Third Team selection as a junior, she has been the team's Most Valuable Player once and the recipient of the Scholar-Athlete Award twice.

Upon graduation, Sarah will begin a full-time position within the engineering core at the EnCana Corporation in Alberta.

TARA FRENCH (Colgate University):

Tara French has excelled both on and off the ice as a senior defender for the Colgate Raiders and a Molecular Biology major who carries a 3.54 GPA. She has also fulfilled Colgate's Pre-Medical requirements.

French has played in 133 career games scoring 11 goals and chipping in 57 assists for 68 points. Tara became Colgate's all-time scoring defender in January 2006, and currently ranks eighth on the all-time scoring list. Her 57 career assists, rank fourth all time at Colgate. She holds the record for most goals tallied by a defender in a season with six, and is on track to lead the Raider defense in scoring for the fourth straight season.

Tara's talents don't end on the ice at Starr Rink. She has attended two Canadian U-22 Conditioning Camps and was a member of the 2006-07 Canadian U-22 team that won the European Air Canada Cup in January 2006. She is the first Colgate skater to attend a national team camp, as she participated in the 2006 Canadian National Team Fall Festival.

Tara is a two-time AWHCA National Scholar-Athlete of the Year and has made the ECAC All-Academic Team three times. She was selected to attend the NCAA Leadership Conference in the summer of 2006. A tutor for Colgate's chemistry and economics departments, Tara is a member of the Tri-Beta Biology Honor Society, and was selected to the Phi Beta Kappa Freshman Honor Society. Her senior honors research project uses a combination of biochemistry and molecular biology to investigate how the movement of a particular protein between the nucleus and cytoplasm of cells influences the rate at which those cells divide - which is an important avenue of basic research with implications for understanding the function of normal and cancerous cells.

She has twice been selected as a LINK member, a Colgate group created to ease first-year students' transitions and to act as a guide through orientation. Tara is also active in the local Hamilton community, and partners with a fifth-grade class, working as a positive role model for area youth.

Tara has been named to an all-league team each year. She was all-rookie in 2003-04, honorable mention in 2004-05 and third-team in 2005-06. She was also selected to the ECACHL All-Star Team in November 2005.

KELSEY JOHNSON (Yale University):

A three-time ECACHL All-Academic selection, senior forward Kelsey Johnson is an economics major who is also completing her pre-med requirements while carrying a 3.81 cumulative grade-point average. The focus of her senior thesis has her working on determining the most cost-effective way to eradicate malaria. Johnson has also participated in numerous community service activities in New Haven, back home in Minnesota, and abroad.

Johnson has been involved extensively with the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life project at Yale. This year she has been elected to the Colleges Against Cancer board as Publicity Chair while also serving as the chair of the Relay for Life Food and Beverage Committee and as a member of the Cancer Education Committee. She has captained a Yale Relay for Life team each of the last two years. Last year she increased her involvement by serving as a member of both the Cancer Education Committee and the Food and Beverage Committee.

Johnson also spent two years tutoring Spanish-speaking elementary students through School Volunteers for New Haven and spent the summer after her freshman year volunteering in the endocrine surgery department at Hospital Universitario Marqués de Valdecilla in Spain. She also volunteered at the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation in the summer after her sophomore year, researching and writing reports on developments in Early Childhood Education. Additionally, she has been a part of Yale's Thomas W. Ford '42 Community Outreach Program, which includes "Skate with the Players" events, Youth Days, and an annual toy drive for underprivileged children.

Johnson will continue her malaria research in a clinical setting this summer at the University of Minnesota, where she will be working with samples from countries such as Uganda and focusing on the genetics of the disease. She plans to eventually attend medical school.