Palo Alto, California, graduate is program's sixth award recipient
NE10 Announces Scholar-Athlete Sports Excellence Recipients for Spring Season
Stonehill's All-Time NE10 Scholar-Athlete Sports Excellence Recipients
EASTON, Mass. (July 6, 2021) – Stonehill College men's track & field graduate Michel-Ange Siaba has been named the Northeast-10 Conference Scholar-Athlete Sports Excellence Award recipient for men's outdoor track & field, the league announced today.
Siaba, who was named the NE10's 2021 Man of the Year last month, has added another award to his resume with his selection as the NE10's Scholar-Athlete Sports Excellence Award recipient for men's outdoor track & field. He is one of ten Sports Excellence Award recipients for the spring athletic season announced by the Conference office today. Siaba is the 36th Stonehill student-athlete to receive Sports Excellence Award accolades, the seventh men's track & field student-athlete, and fifth for the outdoor track & field season since the introduction of the award during the 2009-10 academic year.
Siaba, named Stonehill's Fr. William Gartland, CSC, Male Senior Student-Athlete Award recipient in May, recently graduated Magna Cum Laude with a 3.86 cumulative grade point average as a criminology major at the College. He was a 2021 Fulbright Scholarship semifinalist, Presidential Merit Scholarship recipient and has been inducted to the Edwin H. Sutherland Criminology Honor Society. Siaba was named to the NE10 Academic All-Conference team for Outdoor Track & Field last week and has been named to the Dean's List every semester enrolled at the College, also earning NE10 Academic Honor Roll and Athletic Director's Honor Roll status each semester since transferring to Stonehill.
Siaba made an immediate impact with the track & field program at Stonehill in the brief time he was a Skyhawk after transferring from Humboldt State University prior to the 2019-20 academic year. He was named Most Outstanding Field Athlete at the 2020 Northeast-10 Indoor Track & Field Championships after picking up three All-Conference performances at the event. He earned All-NE10 second team honors for the long jump and triple jump, finishing third in both events with distances of a school-record 23-feet, 1.75-inches and 46-feet 6.75-inches, respectively. Siaba was a third team All-NE10 performer in the heptathlon, posting a school-record 4,666 points for his third-place finish for that event.
Siaba has earned four U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) All-East Region awards, adding the honor in the long jump this spring to honors for the long jump, triple jump and heptathlon during the 2019-20 indoor season. This spring, he posted season-bests of 22-feet, 9-inches in the long jump and 46-feet, 3.5-inches in the triple jump, earning All-New England honors for the first time with his eighth place finish in the long jump at the 2021 New England Outdoor Track & Field Championships.
Siaba, who will attend Suffolk Law School in the fall, has devoted his time to the fight for racial justice throughout the community, especially policing reform centered around his criminology major. An active member of Stonehill's Students in Action (SIA) organization on campus, he helped organize the multimedia needs for the group's campus sit-in during the fall semester. This spring, he interviewed members of the Stonehill faculty on how they engage in racial discourse in the classroom, presenting his findings to the College's President, Fr. John Denning, CSC. He conducted a personal letter writing campaign in the wake of last summer's protests following the George Floyd murder, submitting essays to California State Representative Anna Eshoo and then-Senator Kamala Harris, receiving responses from both, encouraging them to fight to pass meaningful police reform laws.
Siaba has volunteered his time with The Humboldt Area Center for Harm and Karat School Project in Palo Alto, California, a non-profit organization that strives to provide quality education to underprivileged children while helping communities in need in the Ivory Coast, where Siaba was born. More locally, he volunteered with the Plymouth County Police Department's Drug Buy Back program and completed an internship with the department. He was co-editor of Martin Institute's Prints, Stonehill's sociological, anthropological and criminological academic journal, having submitted a writing of his own in the spring 2020 issue that discusses the prison system, why it has persisted and how we can begin to move away from it.
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