Comments about ‘Sterling Scholar Awards: Introduction’

There is one "Category" that is not being included and that is athletics. If you have Dance and Music, etc, why not Athletics? Granted, the UHSAA has an academic All-State award, but the Sterling Scholar award is in a different class althogether and offers scholarship money. I would think the critera to win the Sterling Scholar award in Athletics would be not only academic performance, but also outstanding performance in the area of athletics. It seems that there are likely some outstanding students (even 4.0) students who play a sport or multiple sports on an extremely high level who are being over-looked. Amy Donaladson and James Edwards and the gang, how about using your influence to get this changed?

@ Gondos 2/7/11, 7:19 AM.
Do you mean a Sterling Scholar award for each and all high school sports: like one award for football, one award for basketball, one award for baseball, and so forth; not to mention the runner ups at different positions. You get the idea!

Sorry, that would be next to impossible in my view. That inclusion would dilute the categories and destroy the current Sterling Scholar system of its purposes. Just leave it alone, as it is.

Gondos,
I can't seem to find the source, but I recently read an article on this website that talked about how the idea of the Sterling Scholar came about. An employee of either Deseret News or KSL decided that students who displayed excellence in sports and traditional athletics received quite a bit of public recognition from the community. Academics, however, did not. They wanted a way to publicly recognize ACADEMIC excellence so that even the intellectual all stars could get some public recognition. To provide athletics as a category would completely undermine this goal and make the Sterling Scholar just another run-of-the mill High School award. Like you mentioned, there's already the Academic All State award to honor athletes who excel in school.

And in addition, those students who are excelling at such high levels of athletic competition are already getting scouted out for full-ride scholarships and would not need the Sterling Scholar fund.

I think this award should also invite students of all private high schools in the state of Utah to compete, so the winners are TRUE Utah high school Scholars.