University of Tennessee senior runner Phoebe Wright from Signal Mountain was named Tuesday as the female winner of the McWhorter Award as the top scholar-athlete in the Southeastern Conference.
The male honoree was Auburn swimmer Jordan Anderson, a Rhodes Scholar and biomedical sciences major from Roanoke, Va., with a 3.92 grade point average. He and Wright each will receive a $15,000 post-graduate scholarship, provided by AT&T and the Allstate Sugar Bowl.
A committee of faculty athletic representatives from SEC universities select the winners out of nominees by each school.
“The H. Boyd McWhorter Scholar-Athlete Award is the highest honor a student-athlete can receive in the Southeastern Conference,” commissioner Mike Slive said in the announcement release. “The commitment and dedication that Jordan and Phoebe embody make them excellent selections.”
Wright, a Red Bank High School graduate who began her UT track and field career as a walk-on, won the NCAA 800-meter national championship this past indoor season and is considered the woman to beat for the outdoor championship. She was part of the distance medley relay national champions the last three years, with a world-record time this year, and was the SEC indoor women’s runner of the year.
The eight-time All-American has a 3.96 GPA with a double major in biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology and ecology and evolutionary biology. She made the ESPN The Magazine/CoSIDA Academic All-America first team last spring and will graduate summa cum laude this fall.
Wright also has been active in the community both in Knoxville and back home. In Knoxville she has visited children in hospitals, spoken to youth church groups and participated in Teams for Toys to provide Christmas gifts for needy children. She organized the Red Bank High School Fun Run that raised more than $1,000 for the school’s track and cross country teams, and she volunteers with Chattanooga River Rescue to clean up streams and with the Ecosystem Ecology Lab to help graduate students do field research.
“The SEC is such a talent-laden conference,” Wright said in a UT release about her award. “I feel very, very humbled that I was chosen for such a prestigious award. When I look at the names of the previous winners, such as Lady Vol swimmer Christine Magnuson, it is an incredible honor to be place in the same category.”
Magnuson was the 2009 McWhorter winner.
“We all dream of winning back-to-back national championships, but for a Lady Vol to win the McWhorter Award back-to-back is really an amazing tribute to our student-athletes and our coaches, and what they stand for,” UT women’s athletic director Joan Cronan said. “I am extremely proud of Phoebe’s accomplishments.”
Wright said she has “really leaned on a lot of people” at the university.
Coach J.J. Clark, “for one,” she said, “saw something in me and worked with me every day to try and get the best out of me, on the track and off. The training room kept me healthy, and the Thornton Center provided community-service opportunities that really made it easy for me to get involved in helping other people.”