JASMINE WALLACK OF COLORADO COLLEGE, a senior on the Tigers' women's lacrosse team, has been named the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Female Character and Community Award Winner for the week beginning April 16, 2018.
The SCAC honors the efforts of student-athletes who excel in the field of athletics, and also serve their campus and community.
It’s no surprise Wallack was voted one of the team’s co-captains for the 2018 season, considering she has been a leader on the field, on campus and in the Colorado Springs community throughout her four years in Colorado Springs.
With Wallack on the field, the Tigers have posted a combined 50-18 record, good for a .735 winning percentage, and earned back-to-back at-large selections to the NCAA Division III Women’s Lacrosse Championship.
Wallack has started every game during the last three seasons and with at least four contests remaining this year, she is on track to record personal single-season highs for ground balls and caused turnovers.
In her role as a physical defender, her contributions can sometimes be taken for granted, especially while playing for an offensive juggernaut that consistently ranks among the national leaders in most scoring statistics.
However, Wallack and her defensive partners can be counted on when the Tigers face the top national and regional opponents.
Colorado College’s most recent NCAA tournament victories demonstrate how important defense is to the program. In 2016, the Tigers rolled to an 18-2 win over Rhodes College at Stewart Field. Last year, after trailing 6-5 with 2:14 remaining in the first half against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, CC allowed just four goals in the next 28 minutes and rallied for a 15-12 victory.
Wallack applies the same attention to details to her academic career.
Despite the time demands of playing a collegiate sport and her devotion to a wide variety of campus and community service projects, Wallack owns a 3.74 grade-point average and will graduate in May with a bachelor’s degree in political science along with a minor in nonviolence.
She was one of a record seven Tigers who received the Intercollegiate Women's Lacrosse Coaches Association 's top individual award, a spot on the Academic Honor Roll for recording a cumulative academic GPA or 3.50 or greater.
For the seventh year in a row, as well as the 12th time since the award was established in 2004, CC was named a Zag Sports Academic Honor Squad by the IWLCA for posting a combined grade-point average of at least 3.0 during the 2016-17 academic year.
The product of Princeton Junction, N.J., applied the same unwavering commitment to her passion for community service on campus, in the Colorado Springs community and at the global level.
Wallack serves as a student intern in CC’s Admission Office, where, as a member of G.O.A.L. (Group Outreach Access Liaison), she visits local high schools to talk about how students can gain access to a college education.
She also assists with open houses for prospective students during ‘Tiger Fly-In’ weekends. The program is open to high school seniors or gap-year students currently residing in the United States, who self-identify as a student of color. Her duties include helping students with interview prep and translating for parents.
As part of the College’s Collaborative for Community Engagement, Wallack has been active in the Colorado Springs homeless community, first as a volunteer with Urban Peak, and most recently a student group leader of Roots: Colorado Springs Homeless Collective.
In addition to what she has learned in the classroom and her experience in local community service projects, Wallack has fulfilled a pair of internships with non-profit agencies during the last two summers.
In 2016, she joined the organization Something New and travelled to Selma, Ala., to study and teach nonviolence and civil rights near the site of a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. On March 7, 1965, an estimated 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state and local lawmen attacked them with clubs and tear gas, and drove the marchers back into Selma.
“I learned a lot about the town and not as much has changed as you would expect,” Wallack said. “It’s still a very segregated city, so it was an eye-opening experience.”
Most recently, she spent the summer of 2017 in Boston where she served as a research assistant at the Consortium on Gender Security and Human Rights, an organization devoted to bringing knowledge about gender and security to bear on the quest to end armed conflicts and build sustainable peace.
Wallack gained valuable experience in the non-profit sector while working on projects that analyzed how gender influences urban planning and climate change.