Becky Luetjen, Colorado College, Women's Basketball

BECKY LUETJEN OF COLORADO COLLEGE, a senior forward on the women's basketball team from Lake Oswego, Ore., has been selected the SCAC Character & Community Female Student-Athlete-of-the-Week for the week ending February 19, 2012.

Few student-athletes can match the positive impact Luetjen has made on the Colorado College women’s basketball program throughout her career.

It’s obvious after just one glance at the Tigers’ career-record charts that Luetjen has done virtually everything for the Tigers during the last four seasons.

Heading into the postseason, Luetjen already ranked No. 5 with 1,544 points and 180 steals, as well as No. 4 with 818 rebounds and 215 assists and No. 3 with 90 blocked shots. She is the only player in CC history to be ranked among the top five in all five of those statistics.

Despite being the player every opponent tried to stop, Luetjen was third in the conference averaging 17.5 points per game. She also was fifth in minutes played at 33.1 per game, sixth in rebounding (9.6 per game) free-throw percentage (.802), eighth in field-goal percentage (.452) and 13th in steals at 1.8 per game.

At the same time, she led an injury-plagued team to a second-place finish in the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference’s West Division.

How did the first-team all-SCAC selection accomplish that? By making everyone around her better.

Luetjen has applied that same approach into the other facets of her college life – community service and academics.

An active member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, in which she served as recruiting coordinator, Luetjen was involved in several philanthropy projects. ‘Kicks for CASA’ is an annual community kickball tournament that raises money for the Court Appointed Special Advocates Association of the Pikes Peak Region, while their participation in ‘Charity Denim’ has raised several thousand dollars for CASA and the Kappa Alpha Theta Foundation.

While home in Lake Oswego, Ore., last summer, Luetjen volunteered with Community Partners for Affordable Housing by helping run a program for at-risk youth at a Portland apartment complex.

In Colorado Springs, she volunteered at Midland International Elementary School where she worked one-on-one with fifth-grade students to help them with reading or mathematics.

Luetjen will put that experience to good use when she relocates to Atlanta to serve a two-year stint at a low-income elementary school in the ‘Teach for America’ program. She also may accept a coaching position if an opportunity becomes available.

After that, Luetjen plans to continue her education either in medical school or by pursuing a master’s degree.

Based upon her academic success at Colorado College, graduate school should pose no problem. Luetjen, who carries a 3.56 overall grade-point average and will graduate in May with a degree in English, received the college’s Albert H. Daehler endowed scholarship this year based on the following criteria:

“The recipient is selected in consultation with the English Department. Consideration shall be given to scholarship ability, intellectual promise, abilities as a writer, qualities of character, leadership, initiative and hard work as evidenced by the student's record at CC”.

In January, Luetjen was named to the Capital One Academic All-District second team, proving once again she is just as successful off the court as she is on it.