Jay Keener, a senior defender on The College of Wooster's men's soccer team, was voted on to the 2009 ESPN The Magazine Academic All-America First Team, it was announced Wednesday by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA). Keener was one of 12 student-athletes from within the college division (NCAA Div. II and III, and NAIA) to receive first-team honors.

Keener, a third-team Academic All-American® a year ago, becomes just the eighth Fighting Scot to receive the prestigious award more than once, and it marks the 17th first-team Academic All-American® award overall for the school.

This fall, Keener started at left back for Wooster for the fourth-straight season, serving as one of the cornerstones of a defense that yielded one goal or less in eight of the 16 matches. A two-time all-North Coast Athletic Conference standout, Keener helped the Scots to 27 wins and seven ties during his career, with the defense recording shutouts in 19 of those.

Off the playing field, Keener has compiled a 3.94 grade-point average while majoring in chemistry with a mathematics minor. He was one of just 10 on campus inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society last spring as a junior, and this past summer, he went on a mission trip to Kenya where he taught HIV/AIDS awareness and organized soccer camps. Keener also volunteers with a local outreach program, in which he tutors and spends time with juveniles, and he is the secretary of Wooster's Student Athletic Advisory Committee.

Created in 1952, the Academic All-America Teams program now annually honors 816 male and female student-athletes who have succeeded at the highest level on the playing field and in the classroom. Individuals are selected through voting by CoSIDA, a 2,000-member organization consisting of sports public relations professionals for colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.