Senior-Athletes Nominated for SEC Boyd H. McWhorter Scholarship

By Adam Brown
Sports Editor
adam.brown@hottytoddy.com

Two Ole Miss Rebel senior athletes have been nominated for the SEC Boyd H. McWhorter Scholar-Athlete Postgraduate Scholarship. The University of Mississippi sent in Andrew Raspo from track and field and Emily Stroup from volleyball, the league office announced on Thursday.

The H. Boyd McWhorter Scholar-Athlete Postgraduate Scholarship has been presented by the Southeastern Conference since 1986 to the league’s top male and female scholar-athletes.

This year, the SEC will provide the league’s male and female McWhorter Scholar-Athlete Postgraduate Scholarship recipients with a $20,000 postgraduate scholarship. The 26 remaining male and female finalists for the award will also receive a $10,000 postgraduate scholarship.

Raspo – a managerial finance major and native of Modesto, California – is a three-time SEC Honor Roll member in addition to being selected to the Chancellor’s Honor Roll four times and the Dean’s Honor Roll twice. Raspo was also the Ole Miss representative for the SEC Track Community Service Team in 2019 after his numerous community service efforts such as Adopt a Basket, Reading with the Rebels and A Night to Shine among others. Raspo plans to continue his postgraduate education at Ole Miss next year.

On the track, Raspo earned First-Team All-American status after running the 400-meter leg on Ole Miss’ distance medley relay at the NCAA Indoor Championships in 2019, where the Rebels finished eighth overall. Raspo has scored at an SEC meet twice in his career, and he leaves ranked No. 13 on the all-time Ole Miss indoor 60-meter dash list at 6.81 seconds.

Stroup – a communication disorders major and psychology minor hailing from Fargo, North Dakota – was a national Senior CLASS semifinalist this year after concluding her undergraduate studies ranked within the top five percent of her class. She has been named to the SEC and Chancellor’s Honor Rolls thrice in her career and was also the Ole Miss representative on the SEC Volleyball Community Service Team for 2018. Stroup is a member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars and National Student Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and she also serves as an officer for the Hand Band, an on-campus choir group that performs and entertains in sign language. She has been accepted to continue her graduate studies at the University of Minnesota this fall.

Stroup wrapped up a legendary career for the Rebels this past fall, ending as the career leader in kills with 1,553 total. She started all 97 matches in each of her last three seasons with the Rebels, and as a six-rotation player, did not exit the court once in her final two years. The three-time AVCA All-Region member ranked second in the NCAA in kills during a superb 2018 season that saw her earn All-SEC honors after breaking the Ole Miss single-match kills record three separate times. Stroup finished her career ranked in the top-five of 17 different categories in the Ole Miss record book, and fell just 21 digs shy of becoming just the third Rebel in the modern rally scoring era to join the 1,000/1,000 club.

The recipients of the award are picked by a committee of Faculty Athletics Representatives from all 14 institutions in the SEC and will be announced in May.