April 29, 2008

LEWISBURG, Pa. - Bucknell senior David Mante (Warwick, N.Y./Warwick Valley), a three-time Patriot League pole vault champion and 2007 Patriot League Indoor Scholar-Athlete of the Year, received a special award at the University's annual Senior Athletic Awards Banquet, sponsored by the Bison Club and held in Sojka Pavilion on April 29.

Mante won the Alvin F. Jackson Jr. Memorial Scholar Athlete Award, presented to senior athletes "for outstanding academic and athletic achievement, and future promise as Bucknell alumni." Mante shared the award with Kelly Hoffman of the field hockey team.

In addition to Mante and Hoffman, several other student-athletes were honored at the banquet, including the winners of the Christy Mathewson Award, given to the most outstanding athletes in the senior class. Rowing All-American Katherine Brewster-Duffy, won the women's Mathewson Award, while four-time All-Patriot League honoree Jason Buursma of the baseball team won the men's Mathewson Award.

A civil and environmental engineering major, Mante holds a 3.68 cumulative grade-point average and, in 2007, was named to the ESPN The Magazine Academic All-District II Track and Field First Team, the USTFCCCA Division I All-Academic Track and Field First Team and was tabbed the Patriot League Indoor Scholar-Athlete of the Year. He has also received a national civil engineering scholarship from the Moles, an elite national engineering organization, is a three-time member of the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll and has been on the Dean's List six out of a possible seven semesters.

Mante ranks second on both the indoor (16-3 ¼) and outdoor (16-2) top-10 lists for the pole vault in the Bison record books and has scored in the event at the Patriot League Championships in each of his four years at Bucknell. Mante won the league title in the pole vault both indoors and outdoors in 2007 and repeated as indoor champion this past winter for his third First Team All-Patriot League accolade.

As a junior in 2007, Mante garnered All-East recognition for an eighth-place showing at the indoor IC4A Championships and outdoors he qualified for the NCAA Regional where he took 15th.

Bucknell is a highly-selective, privately endowed liberal arts institution with an enrollment of approximately 3,400 undergraduate students. Bucknell competes in NCAA Division I as a member of the Patriot League and has full membership along with American, Army, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, Lehigh and Navy. Bucknell has won the Presidents' Cup, signifying the Patriot League's all-sports champion, in 13 of 17 years, including nine of the last 10.

Recently, 17 Bison programs - the seventh-most in Division I - earned NCAA Public Recognition for having Academic Performance Rates in the top 10 percent nationally in their respective sport. In addition, Bucknell ranks fifth in Division I in the total number of CoSIDA Academic All-America selections, with 114 national Academic All-Americans since 1970.