University of North Carolina Ashville Athletics
Grace Volk Selected to CoSIDA Academic All-District Team
06.10.2021 | Women's Volleyball
ASHEVILLE, N.C. – UNC Asheville volleyball player Grace Volk was named to the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) Women's Volleyball Academic All-District team the organization announced Thursday. Volk is the first Bulldog since Rose Butler in 2005 to earn this recognition from CoSIDA.
Thursday's honor adds to a lengthy list of academic achievements for Volk in 2021. Earlier this year Volk was named a recipient of the Goldwater Scholarship, which is the preeminent national award for an undergraduate student in natural sciences, engineering or mathematics. Furthermore, Volk also became the second Asheville volleyball player ever to be named the Big South's Scholar Athlete of the Year.
A rising senior, Volk is a chemistry major and a member of the Honors Program at UNC Asheville. As part of her major, Volk is researching antibiotic compounds created through bacterial co-culture, isolation and extraction. Volk, who is mentored by Dr. Amanda Wolf, then identifies the antibiotic compounds that are produced through bacterial competition. Volk's work has even been published, as she is a co-author of, "Advances in antibiotic drug discovery: reducing the barriers for antibiotic development" in Future Medicinal Chemistry (2020)."
On the court, Volk paced the Bulldogs in assists (493), hitting percentage (.263), and placed second in digs (160) and aces (13) during the spring. Volk, who appeared in and played in every set for Asheville this past season, also became the 13th player in program history to reach the 1,000-assist mark in a match on March 18 at USC Upstate.
