ST. LOUIS – Missouri State’s Lacey Boshe has been named Prairie Farms MVC Scholar-Athlete of the Year and headlines a group of five of the league’s top players named to the 2012 Missouri Valley Conference Women’s Basketball Scholar-Athlete First Team, as voted by the conference’s Sports Information Directors. Boshe becomes the first Missouri State student-athlete to earn Scholar-Athlete of the Year honors in women’s basketball, and is also the first Lady Bear to earn first team scholar-athlete status since Tahnee Balerio in 2006-07. She was also named a second team CoSIDA Academic All-American in late February. In all, 19 players were honored on the scholar-athlete teams.

With a perfect 4.0 grade-point average in a double major of Molecular Biology and Spanish, Boshe was previously a second team MVC scholar-athlete as a sophomore and junior. Boshe is the sixth Lady Bear to earn the distinction, bringing the total of nine Academic All-America appearances in Missouri State history. She is joined on the first team by teammate Karly Buer, Creighton Sarah Nelson, Indiana State’s Shannon Thomas and Bradley’s MacKenzie Westcott.

Second team selections include Wichita State’s Jessica Diamond, Deja Mattox and Anna Munn of Indiana State, UNI’s Amber Kirschbaum and Evansville’s Taylor Ware.

The criteria for the scholar-athlete team balloting parallels the CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America) standards for Academic All-America voting. Nominees must be starters or important reserves, have played at least 75 percent of a team’s games, and must carry at least a 3.20 GPA (on a 4.0 scale). 

Student-athletes must also have reached sophomore athletic and academic standing at their institution (true and redshirt freshmen are not eligible) and must have completed at least one full academic year at the institution.

A total of 27 Valley student-athletes met the nomination criteria for scholar-athlete honors in 2012.