June 4, 2009

COLUMBIA, S.C. – The South Carolina track and field team placed two members on the ESPN The Magazine Academic All-District III First Team, the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) announced Thursday. Senior Curt McGill and junior Elliott Haynie both earned first team bids as the Gamecocks lead the SEC and are tied for the third in the nation for the most selections to the award given for academic and athletic excellence.

To be eligible for Academic All-District honors, student-athletes must hold at least a 3.3 grade point average and be a sophomore in academic and athletic standing. The bid is the first for McGill and the second for Haynie, who was named an Academic All-American last season while competing at Gardner-Webb University.

Haynie (Atlanta, Ga.) earns first team honors for the second consecutive year and in his first year as a Gamecock. In his short time in Columbia, Haynie holds the South Carolina outdoor record in the pole vault at 17-10 ½, a mark that currently ranks sixth in the nation heading into the NCAA Outdoor Championships next week. He was a silver medalist at the SEC Outdoor Championships. A four-time Atlantic Sun champion at Gardner-Webb, he also holds the Atlantic Sun Conference record in the heptathlon with 4,645 points.

McGill (Spartanburg, S.C.) has consistently been one of the top multi-event athletes since joining the Gamecocks. A five-time scorer at the SEC Indoor and Outdoor Championships, he holds a career-best 5,292 points in the heptathlon set at the 2009 SEC Indoor Championships where he won three events and placed fourth overall. Recently, McGill was one of 45 out of 500 people accepted into Duke Medical School after posting a 3.88 GPA in exercise science.