ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT Georgetown Among Top 20 Sports Schools By Tom Kenny Hoya Staff Writer

U.S. News and World Report recognized Georgetown’s athletic program as one of 20 schools on its sports honor roll last week. Georgetown joins fellow Big East Conference members Boston College, the University of Connecticut and Villanova on the honor roll. The Big East was second only to the Ivy League, who placed six schools on the list.

This was the first year that U.S. News has evaluated athletic programs. “This week, U.S.News and World Report inaugurates an effort to go beyond the headlines of the sports pages and examine more broadly the quality of America’s Division I athletic programs,” Gordon Witkin and Jodi Schneider reported in the cover story. They surveyed all 321 schools that compete at the Division I level in the NCAA. The honor roll recognized the schools that performed well on the five criteria with which programs were evaluated.

The first criterion measured how many major infractions a school was assessed in the last 10 years. The second category looked at the school’s progress in increasing opportunities for women. The third criterion was a combination of a school’s win/loss record in school to school contests such as basketball and soccer and its showing in the NCAA Tournament in sports such as track and field, which are dominated by multi-school competitions. The fourth category measured the number of sports offered and the fifth compared the school’s student-athlete graduation rate over a six year period to the graduation rate of the entire student body.