PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Commissioner Mike Aresco has announced that University of Memphis baseball player Zach Willis and University of Connecticut volleyball player Jackie Wattles have been named the 2013-14 winners of the Michael Tranghese Postgraduate Leadership Awards. The selections were made by the Conference’s Academic Affairs Committee.
The awards are given to one male and one female student-athlete from an American Athletic Conference-sponsored sport who have been admitted to a degree-granting or professional program for the following year and who have demonstrated leadership through excellence in academic credentials, athletic performance and depth of commitment to service within the institution or the community.
Willis and Wattles will each receive a $5,000 scholarship, which may be applied to postgraduate study.
Willis, who hails from Bartlett, Tenn., was the starting second baseman for the Tigers and finished as the team leader with 41 runs scored as a senior. He made 54 starts and played in 57 games in 2014, hitting .264 with a home run and 25 runs batted in and committing just nine errors on 264 defensive chances. He started all 59 games as a junior in 2013, when he hit .305 and led the Tigers with a .412 on-base percentage. He is a career .282 hitter who scored 106 runs and had 150 hits in 184 career games.
Willis had a 3.85 grade-point average and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Memphis’ honors accounting program. He was a member of the Beta Alpha Psi honors organization at Memphis, through which he was involved in a number of community service efforts. He served as a tutor for accounting students at the university and volunteered at the Memphis Zoo and the Memphis Botanical Gardens. He additionally earned the Cecil C. Humphrey Presidential Scholarship, which included a service requirement of 75 hours per semester. Willis plans to pursue a master’s degree in accounting.
Wattles, a native of Liberty Hill, Texas, was a four-year middle blocker for UConn’s volleyball team and was chosen as a team captain in 2013. She played in 12 matches as a senior, hitting .394 and averaging 0.39 blocks per set. She is a veteran of 77 matches, including 47 career starts. She finished her career with 290 kills and 133 total blocks to go with a .231 hitting percentage.
Wattles earned a 4.00 GPA in three semesters and had a cumulative average of 3.78. She majored in political science and journalism and will pursue a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University in the fall. She served as the associate editor of The Daily Campus, was a member of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and served as a volunteer with HuskyReads, a program that supports reading and sportsmanship at elementary schools in Connecticut.
The American Athletic Conference Michael Tranghese Leadership Award is one of a number of scholarships presented by the conference during the 2013-14 academic year. One male and one female from each of the conference’s member institutions were named as the winners of the conference’s Institutional Scholar-Athlete Scholarships. The conference also named male and female Basketball Scholar-Athletes of the Year and a Football Scholar-Athlete of the Year. The winners of the institutional, basketball and football awards were then eligible for the American Athletic Conference Scholar-Athlete of the Year award, which provided an additional postgraduate scholarship to one male and one female student-athlete.