Winners announced in HBS exceptional athlete awards

Delia Zanoschi and Tum Preugpaibul (RCs) announce the winners of the inaugural HBS exceptional athlete awards, an initiative they started this year to recognise the best athletes at HBS.

Over the past few weeks we were proud to have met and interviewed the finalists for the HBS Exceptional Athlete Awards. The talks we had were humbling, sparkling, genuine, engaging and made us discover a different side of our MBA classmates.

The winners for the MBA Class of 2016 Exceptional Athlete Awards are:

Soccer: Francesco Balestra (Section F), Juan Muxi (Section G)

Basketball Men: George Rudolph (Section A), Daniel Fisher (Section D)

Basketball Women: Nora Barr (Section H), Karley Marty (Section G)

Badminton: Rahul Lele (Section F), Gaurav Varshney (Section I)

Squash: Ben Gettinger (Section A), Parth Jindal (Section G)

Tennis: John Watts (Section H), Jeff Zeller (Section B)

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The HBS Exceptional Athlete Awards are given to two athletes in each of the following 5 sport categories: basketball, soccer, tennis, badminton, and squash. The awards are designed to recognize individual athletic achievement and sports-related performance.

The purpose of these awards is to celebrate sports excellence among RCs who have played competitively at collegiate and professional levels.

athlete4Award winners have been selected through a two stage process. In the first stage, team captains from each section nominated the best players in their section for the five sport categories. In the second stage, the top 2 players in the MBA Class of 2016 in each of the sport categories were selected based on nominations we received, referrals, and players’ track records.

The twelve people in our class were chosen as finalists for the Class of 2016 Exceptional MBA Athlete Awards in recognition of their long-standing performance in sports. These individuals are among the most talented athletes in the RC class and we have been impressed with their many achievements.

And for the curious ones, the entire idea started from a field 3 project of our team: Delia Zanoschi, Tum Preugpaibul, Mauricio Concha Zegarra, Matt Chu, Karin Antoun. That is, until we met these athletes and fell in love with the initiative.