Continuing the series that began in 2016-17, each Wednesday MGoBlue.com will highlight a Michigan student-athlete and their academic pursuits. These are our Scholar-Athlete Stories, presented by Absopure.
By Kyle Terwillegar
It was supposed to be a surprise, but Alice Hill quickly suspected something was up.
Though neither she nor her teammates from the University of Michigan women’s cross country team had earned any of the All-America or team awards that were about to be presented after the conclusion of the NCAA Cross Country Championships in Tallahassee, Fla., this past November, they were being urged to prepare for the ceremony.
“Coach (Mike) McGuire was very insistent that we all wore matching outfits and go over to the awards,” Hill recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘Why do we need to go to the awards, what’s going on over there?’ And then my mom came over to find me and kept telling me to fix my hair, and she was fixing my outfit. She knows something, something’s up.”
It was not until the public address commentator announced her name that the surprise fully revealed itself: she had been chosen as the NCAA Elite 90 Award Winner for women’s cross country. Among the 256 competitors in the meet, including 14 who had perfect cumulative grade-point averages, she was selected as the most outstanding student in the entire field, with the tie broken by the number of credit hours completed.
“It was a real honor to receive the award,” said Hill, a graduate student in the ecology and evolutionary biology program. “It was very rewarding to be acknowledged for the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. We’re called student-athletes, but a lot of the press only talks about your athletic accomplishments and at the end of the day, especially for me, what’s going to last — what’s going to impact the rest of my life — is my degree and my academics.
“It’s nice to show what an important part of my life that is and acknowledge that it takes up a lot of time and effort, and it can be hard to balance both.”
While the announcement itself may have been a surprise to Hill in that moment, no outside observer with even a passing familiarity with her career at Michigan would be surprised to see her with the Elite 90 trophy in hand.
Already a two-time Academic All-American and the University of Michigan’s 2021 Big Ten Medal of Honor winner, Hill graduated as a James B. Angell Scholar with her bachelor’s degree in ecology and…
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