Contact: Clark Teuscher, Sports Information Director, 630-637-5302
May 29, 2024 - North Central College graduate and former football student-athlete Ben Wong '20 has been selected as one of 126 student-athletes during the 2023-2024 academic year to receive an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship.
The NCAA's Postgraduate Scholarship program, instituted in 1964, promotes and encourages education by rewarding the Association's most accomplished student-athletes. To qualify, student-athletes must maintain at least a 3.2 grade-point average and be nominated by their institution's faculty athletics representative. The one-time non-renewable scholarships of $10,000 are awarded three times a year corresponding to each sport season (fall, winter and spring). Each sports season there are 21 scholarships available for men and 21 scholarships available for women for use in an accredited graduate program.
All former student-athletes who earned an undergraduate degree from an NCAA member school are eligible to be nominated by that school for an NCAA graduate degree scholarship, regardless of when they received their undergraduate degree.
A four-year letter winner and three-year starter at linebacker for the Cardinals from 2017-2021, Wong was North Central's first student-athlete to earn College Sports Communicators (CSC) Academic All-America honors three times and received the NCAA's Elite 90 Award at the 2021 Division III Football Championship. Wong was a two-time All-College Conference of Illinois & Wisconsin (CCIW) First Team honoree and a three-time Academic All-CCIW selection, winning North Central's Jack Swartz Academic All-Conference award in 2021.
Wong co-authored a peer-reviewed article which appeared in the Nov. 27, 2022 issue of Addiction Biology, a quarterly scientific journal covering research on substance abuse. He is entering his third year of study at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
A graduate of North Central with majors in psychology and neuroscience, Wong is the first Cardinal to receive an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship since women's triathlon alumna Naomi Hill '21 in 2021 and is the second North Central football player to receive the award, joining Peter Bulandr '12 in 2012.
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