Athletics News WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL LES SCHOFER
FOOTBALL Liberty won its fifth Big South Conference championship in the last six years. The Flames finished with a 6-5 overall record (5-1 BSC), the team’s seventh-straight winning season. A 33-14 win over VMI capped Flames Head Coach Turner Gill’s first season at Liberty and pushed the Big South title into a three-way tie. Coastal Carolina (7-4, 5-1 BSC) and Stony Brook (9-2, 5-1 BSC) shared the crown with Liberty. Coastal earned the automatic bid to the NCAA FCS Playoffs based on a series of conference tiebreakers. This year’s senior class finished their careers at Liberty as the fourth winningest class in program history (29-15) with three Big South titles (2009, 2010, and 2012) and a 20-4 Big South record.
For the second year in a row, Liberty wide receiver Pat Kelly was named to the Capital One Academic All-America Football Division I first team, as selected by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA). This is the top collegiate academic honor that an NCAA studentathlete can earn. The senior has maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA in his pursuit of an exercise science degree. He is the second Liberty student-athlete to be named to multiple CoSIDA Academic All-America first-team listings and the 18th student-athlete in athletics department history to be named to the lineup.
The Lady Flames volleyball team won its conference-record seventh BSC title with a 3-1 finals victory over Coastal Carolina. Liberty entered the conference tournament as the top seed after posting a 22-7 (12-2 BSC) regular season record. The Lady Flames have won a program-record 21 conference home matches in a row. The season ended for the Lady Flames in the first round of the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball National Championship after a hard-fought loss to No. 8 Minnesota. Liberty fell in three straight sets, but pushed the final set to 34-32, the Lady Flames’ longest set since the 25-point rally-scoring format began in 2008.
CROSS COUNTRY Liberty swept the Big South team titles at the Big South Men’s and Women’s Cross Country Championships in October. Redshirt senior Jennifer Klugh won her third consecutive Big South women’s individual crown. Klugh went on to place sixth in the women’s 6K race at the NCAA Division I Southeast Regional Cross Country Championships, qualifying for
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nationals. She led the Lady Flames to finish 15th out of 37 teams. The men’s team finished seventh out of 34 squads, their best finish since 2008. At nationals, Klugh wrapped up her stellar collegiate career by finishing well within the top half of the 253 women’s finishers in the 6K race, her first NCAA national meet appearance. She marked a 93rd-place finish.