The Hillsdale College Athletic Department is pleased to announce that women's cross country and track and field athlete and recent Hillsdale graduate Margaret Scheske is our nominee for the 2023 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
The NCAA Woman of the Year award was established in 1991 to recognize graduating female student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves in academics, athletics, service and leadership throughout their collegiate careers.
NCAA member schools are encouraged to honor their top graduating female college athlete each year by submitting their name for consideration for the award. This year, a record-breaking 619 athletes from across all three NCAA divisions were submitted, including 128 Division II athletes.
Scheske is Hillsdale's nominee after a four-year career that saw her excel in every season, fall, winter and spring, in the classroom and in the community at elite levels.
As an athlete, Scheske made her biggest contribution in her signature event, the outdoor 3,000m steeplechase, where she was a three-time NCAA DII Outdoor Championships qualifier and earned second-team All-American honors with a 10th place finish in the 2021 Outdoor Championships in the event (10:48.78). Scheske also won the 2023 G-MAC Outdoor Championship in the event as well.
In addition to that consistent success outdoors, Scheske also had impressive success indoors in her final collegiate season, placing ninth in the mile (4:58.81) and also taking ninth as a part of Hillsdale's Distance Medley Relay (11:36.96) to earn second-team All-American honors in both events at the 2023 NCAA DII Indoor Championships. Scheske also won the 2023 Indoor G-MAC title in the mile run in 4:48.19 and took second in the 3,000m run as well.
For her track and field career, Scheske posted seven NCAA DII provisional qualifying times and was a 10-time placer at G-MAC meets, with two individual conference titles and two runner-up finishes.
Scheske also was a key contributor for the Chargers in cross country, earning All-G-MAC honors in three straight seasons, including a first-team honor with a sixth place finish as a senior at the 2023 G-MAC Championships (21:47.3). Scheske was a part of Hillsdale's G-MAC title-winning 2019 squad, as well as runner-up finishes in 2020 and 2022, and competed in three NCAA DII Championship meets during her career, with a best finish of 76th in the nation in a time of 21:47.8 at the 2022 NCAA Championships.
As well as being an elite distance competitor at the national level for the Chargers, Scheske also was a standout for Hillsdale in the classroom. The Sturgis, Michigan native graduated cum laude from Hillsdale this past spring with a degree in Philosophy and Religion, and is a three-time USTFCCCA All-Academic honoree and a four-time Academic All-G-MAC recipient, as well as a 2023 College Sports Communicators Academic All-District honoree. During her time at Hillsdale, Scheske studied abroad at the Pontifical University of Pope John Paul II in Krakow, Poland and also successfully defended a senior thesis, "Trinitarian Personalism and its Implications on Freedom, Creativity and Truth: A Proposed Synthesis of John Paul II's Christological Personalism and Sergius Bulgakov's Pneumatology" in order to receive Collegiate Scholar Honors this past spring.
Scheske also made an outsized mark in the community in several ways while at Hillsdale. She was a member of both the Phi Sigma Tau Philosophy honorary and the Tau Alpha Kappa Religious Studies Honorary, as well as the Hillsdale College Catholic Society. Her many charitable endeavors included volunteeering as a Sunday School teacher at St. Anthony of Padua Church at Hillsdale, the Love Inc. misison to the poor and homeless, and as a volunteer teacher at the Mary Randall Preschool in Hillsdale. She also spent the summer of 2022 in Krakow, Poland as a missionary helping to provide aid at a refugee camp for people fleeing the conflict in Ukraine.
Scheske joins former teammates Alanna O'Leary (2022), Christina Sawyer (2021) and Arena Lewis (2020) as the nominee for Hillsdale for this award, and moves on to the next stage of consideration, already under way.
The G-MAC office will next select up to two nominees each from the pool of eligible nominees from the G-MAC's 13 member institutions for the 2022-23 school year. All candidates selected by their conference will be considered by the Woman of the Year selection committee, made up of representatives from the NCAA membership, who will choose the Top 30 honorees – 10 from each division.
From the Top 30, the Woman of the Year selection committee will determine the top three honorees in each division and announce nine finalists. The NCAA Committee on Women's Athletics then will choose the 2023 NCAA Woman of the Year, who will be named this fall.
For more information on the award and the nomination process, as well as past honorees, visit the NCAA Woman of the Year website here.