IRVING, Texas – Commissioner Mike Aresco has announced that Memphis baseball player Alec Trela and Tulane swimmer Jeni Griffin have been chosen as the winners of the 2020-21 Commissioner’s Postgraduate Leadership Awards by the American Athletic Conference faculty athletics representatives.
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.
Trela and Griffin will each receive a $5,000 scholarship, which may be applied to postgraduate study.
Trela becomes the fifth Memphis student-athlete, and the second Tiger baseball player, to earn a Commissioner’s Postgraduate Leadership Award. A native of Bloomington, Illinois, Trela started all 57 games in 2021, finishing the season with 12 home runs and 31 runs batted in. He started all but one game during his four-year career and was a two-time CoSIDA Academic All-America selection, including a first-team choice in 2020.
Trela graduated from Memphis with a 3.94 grade-point average as an undergraduate with a degree in biomedical engineering. He was the student marshal for Memphis’ College of Engineering as the student with the highest cumulative GPA in the Fall 2020 graduating class. A member of the Phi Alpha, Tau Beta Pi and Alpha Eta Mu Beta honors societies, Trela served as a lab technician at Memphis and for US Biologics and has been an active participant in a number of community service initiatives, including the Step-Up for Down Syndrome Walk and the Jason Motte “K Cancer” Cornhole Event. He is planning to pursue a PhD in biomedical engineering.
Griffin, who hails from Rancho Santa Margarita, California, becomes the first student-athlete from Tulane to win a Commissioner’s Postgraduate Leadership Award. A four-year letterwinner on the Green Wave swimming and diving team, Griffin served as team captain in the 2020-21 season.
Griffin earned a 3.898 undergraduate grade-point average as a double major in public health and economics. She is a member of the Chi Alpha Sigma national honors society and the Phi Alpha Delta law fraternity. She served as president of Tulane’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee in the 2020-21 academic year and was co-chair of the SAAC’s diversity and inclusion committee. She serves as a swim coach with the Special Olympics and has been a volunteer intern with the Orleans Public Defenders and plans to pursue a law degree.