DAYTON – Approximately 1,400 seniors graduated from the University of Dayton on Sunday, and among them were more than 50 Flyer student-athletes.

The 2015 class of Dayton student-athletes will go down as one of the most accomplished in UD history.

Some of their accomplishments include:
-15 NCAA Tournament appearances 
-11 conference championships 
- More than 20 UD student-athletes recognized on All-Academic teams over the past four years
- Flyer student-athletes currently have a combined cumulative GPA of 3.26
- This year's seniors (including those who graduated last December) have volunteered well over 1,000 hours in community service while at UD.

Some of these student-athletes will continue their athletic careers.  Members of the baseball, rowing, softball and track teams will finish their UD seasons after Sunday's graduation ceremonies (student-athletes unable to attend Sunday's graduation ceremonies due to competition will receive their degrees in a private ceremony next week).

Two football players, Ross Smith and Zach Elias, are already playing professionally in Germany.   Two members of UD's 2015 NCAA Elite Eight team, Ally Malott and Andrea Hoover, were drafted by the WNBA.  Jordan Sibert is also pursuing a professional basketball career.  One current pro, minor league baseball player Mike Hauschild, returned to campus in the fall of 2014 and received his degree this spring.
 
Another football player, quarterback Luke Johnson, will be in grad school next season while completing his football career.

Two Flyer grads will be coaching next year.  Golfer Lucy Frey will be teaching while coaching golf at her high school alma mater, Cincinnati McNicholas.  Volleyball's Rachel Jones has accepted a volleyball graduate assistant's position at Lake Erie College in Cleveland while pursuing a Master's in Health Care Administration.

Many other grads will go straight into furthering their educations, such as track's Ellie Grandi (accounting at UD), Mary List (University of Louisville med school) and Katie Ollier (UD's physical therapy school), football's Trey Cole (education at Seton Hill University) and soccer's Ryan Peterson (Ohio State's pharmacy school).

But most will move into a new phase of their lives, and the jobs they have will take them as far as Denver (football's Jack Beebe), Texas (golf's George Rhode III to Austin, softball's Kayla English to Dallas) or in the case of tennis' Josh Malyon, back home to Port Perry, Ontario.

Perhaps the best representative of the Flyer class of 2015 is Isolde Hannan.  A rare two-sport Division I student-athlete, she was an Honorable Mention AVCA All-American in volleyball and was part of three A-10 championships.  When her volleyball career was over, the Dublin, Ohio native joined the Dayton track and field team as a high jumper. An engineering major, she has taken a job as a senior analyst-software engineer at Cardinal Health's Fuse technology laboratory in Columbus.

UD's class of 2015 will move on to the next chapter of their lives, the majority using their education, business and engineering degrees in their chosen professions.  But one thing is for certain.  They will always be Flyers.