Courtesy of Florida A&M Athletic Communications
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. | Florida A&M University’s Alelee Figueroa, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) Woman of the Year, has been selected among 605 female college student-athletes as a 2020 NCAA Woman of the Year Award nominee, the NCAA announced on Tuesday.
Rooted in Title IX and directed by the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics, the NCAA Woman of the Year program celebrates the accomplishments of female college athletes across all three NCAA divisions. In 2020, nearly 220,000 women are competing in college sports, and the NCAA received a program record of 605 nominations for this prestigious award.
The Orlando, Fla. native won the MEAC championship in the hammer throw at the 2019 MEAC Outdoor Track & Field Championships (50.42 meters; 165 feet, five inches), and she also won that event this past indoor season at the KMS Invitational. She was part of a Rattler squad that won the 2018 MEAC women’s outdoor track & field championship, edging North Carolina A&T State by half a point.
Graduating this past May with a 3.90 GPA in Criminal Justice (concentration in Pre-Law Studies), Figueroa had the highest GPA in both the MS3 and MS4 classes of the Florida A&M Army ROTC Rattler Battalion. She was a Distinguished Scholar awardee in 2016, and Figueroa was named both a National Society of Collegiate Scholars inductee and a Nutrition L.E.A.D.S. Scholar in 2017.
In 2019, Figueroa, who earned FAMU’s first Woman of the Year honor, was an IFPO Protection Officer Certification Awardee from the International Organization of Black Security Executives (IOBSE) and a recipient of the FAMU Army ROTC Rattler Battalion’s Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Award.
In addition to serving in the Army ROTC Rattler Battalion all four years, Figueroa was busy in the community. In 2017, she volunteered at the Wakulla County Community Center, tending to the community garden, cleaning and preparing harvested fruits and vegetables and promoting nutrition at community events. From 2018-20, she was a volunteer lead and pageant candidate with the Big Bend Filipino-American Association; not only did she help coordinate all community outreach events and fundraise for the Bantay Bata charity, she also represented Tallahassee, Fla. in the annual national pageant.
Figueroa was an S-2 Expansion and security officer for the National Society of Pershing Angels Sorority, Inc. in 2019, managing security clearance issues and providing both intelligence oversight and physical security. She was an S-3 Operations and Training Officer this year, on top of serving as Vice President of Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity, International, FAMU Pre-Law Chapter (which she helped re-charter), and HBCU for Life Committee Co-Chair for the Beta Alpha Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
Figueroa will represent the MEAC as its nominee for the NCAA Woman of the Year award. The NCAA established this award in 1991 to celebrate the achievements of women in intercollegiate athletics. Now in its 29th year, the award is unique because it recognizes not only the athletic achievements of outstanding young women, but also their academic achievements, community service and leadership.
The nominees represent all three NCAA divisions, including 259 nominees from Division I, 126 from Division II and 220 from Division III. Nominees competed in 24 sports, with multisport student-athletes accounting for 128 of the nominee.
Conference nominations are forwarded to the NCAA Woman of the Year Selection Committee, which identifies the top 10 honorees in each of the three NCAA divisions. From those 30 honorees, the selection committee then determines the three finalists in each division for a total of nine finalists.
The Committee on Women’s Athletics will select the 2020 NCAA Woman of the Year from the nine finalists. The 2020 NCAA Woman of the Year will be announced this fall.
