The College of Wooster's Lake Barrett is a first-team College Sports Communicators Academic All-American® once again, as announced by the national organization on Tuesday. This is Barrett's third CSC Academic All-America® selection, and the Fighting Scots' placekicker is the College's fourth three-time Academic All-American® and second from football.
This fall, Barrett was one of 10 finalists for the Fred Mitchell Award, given annually to the best placekicker for a combination of elite athletics, academics, and community service. Over 700 non-NCAA Div. I Football Bowl Subdivision college teams are eligible to submit a nominee for the prestigious award. Elsewhere, Wooster's first North Coast Athletic Conference Special Teams Player of the Year was a first-team D3football.com All-Region IV selection, earned first-team All-NCAC honors, repeated as a semifinalist for the National Football Foundation's William V. Campbell Trophy, and was the Scots' nominee for the Allstate American Football Coaches Association Good Works Team. Barrett is currently up for consideration for the Athletes for a Better World Coach John Wooden Citizenship Cup.
The eighth player in program history to earn All-NCAC honors in four years went 8-for-10 on field goals this fall and was a perfect 43-for-43 on extra-point tries. The senior matched a career-long with a 42-yard field goal in the season finale at Wittenberg University. That make upped Barrett's career school record to 29 field goals, and he finished second all-time with a 76 percent success rate. The all-time leader in extra-point percentage had just one miss over 156 career attempts and ended a standout career with 134 consecutive extra-point makes. Barrett's 155 extra-point makes are the second-most all-time in program history, and he graduated second all-time at Wooster among placekickers with 242 points.
The two-time all-region honoree scored the other honor in 2021, following a season in which he went 47-for-47 on extra points and 8-for-10 on field goals. The three-time CSC Academic All-District® selection exploded onto the scene in 2019, ending the year with honorable mention All-NCAC honors. The Fred Mitchell Award Watch List choice broke Wooster's single-season record with 11 field goals. As a first-year, Barrett was 11-for-14 on field goals and 26-for-27 on extra-point tries. He ranked 16th nationally and tops in the NCAC with a 78.6 field-goal percentage, and was in the top-20 in field goals per game.
The biology and education major spent summer 2023 in Peru, interning with Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon. There, Barrett studied differences in frog species in the local forest and contributed to the organization's reforestation advocacy efforts with the Peruvian government. Additionally, Barrett helped with education outreach initiatives. Earlier in his undergraduate studies, Barrett studied abroad in Panama and was a tropical ecology researcher.
Barrett's Independent Study yielded groundbreaking research in black squirrel mutation, specifically that mutation in black squirrels in Colorado is different than those found in Ohio. On campus, Barrett was a lead zoology lab assistant, a field researcher in the areas of squirrel, salamander, and frog research, cataloged and organized the College's natural history specimen collection, contributed to the College earning Bee Campus USA certification, and maintained a colony of poisonous strawberry dart frogs in one of the College's labs.
Barrett's selection marks the 63rd all-time Academic All-American® for the College, 14 of which have come in the last five years. He joins football's Blake Moore (1977-79), women's soccer's Paige Piper (2010-12), and women's cross country and track and field's Erin Plews-Ogan (2011-13) as three-time honorees. Football has earned 19 of the College's Academic All-America® honors, and the program has nine selections during head coach Frank Colaprete's tenure.