Last fall, Kris Livingston brought a packet of academic information on the football players to Colorado head coach Deion Sanders, as she does every couple of weeks.

Livingston, CU’s executive senior associate athletic director over student success, was leading a meeting with coaches and Sanders told her he’d wait until after the meeting to read the packet.

“Well, he couldn’t (wait), so he opens up the envelope, pulls it out and he’s looking,” Livingston said. “By the time I ended the meeting, I had a conversation with somebody else and went down to my office at (the Dal Ward Center) and already had word that guys were lined up outside of his office that he had called in because their grades weren’t up to par.”

If there was ever a doubt about Coach Prime taking the grades of his players seriously, those went away that day.

“I went, ‘OK, well, this is real,’ and it truly is,” Livingston said. “He talks the talk about classes, about academics, about education, and he walks the walk. He has pulled guys out of practice, out of competition. Maybe they don’t get the number that they want to wear on their jersey because they’re not handling academics. He walks the walk.”

Sanders isn’t the only one walking the walk at CU and because of that, the athletic department and Livingston recently celebrated unprecedented success in the classroom.Earlier this month, CU announced that student-athletes posted a 3.287 grade-point average in the fall semester, the highest mark in school history. The cumulative GPA of the 354 student-athletes is also a record, at 3.254.

For the first time, every team finished the semester above 3.0. Eight teams earned their best-ever semester GPA, including Coach Prime’s football team, at 3.011.

“It just speaks to the volume of a lot of things go into that,” Livingston said. “There’s architecture behind that. We have a strategic plan that we’ve had since (athletic director) Rick George got here. We did one for the Herbst Academic Center, and that has led us to this moment. For our staff in academics, we plan our work and we work our plan, and it shows success, so we know how to do it.”

Livingston has overseen CU’s academic support services in athletics for 16 years.

She and her team of 15 full-time employees, plus a couple of interns, formulate individualized academic plans for every student-athlete.

It takes a lot of people, including Livingston and her staff, to achieve success with those plans.

“Then it’s a matter of the coaches recruiting student-athletes, and then students really wanting to get their degree and wanting to be successful,” she said. “Then a large part is the coaches holding them accountable, because I think, literally, we can’t do what we need to do in the academic side if the students aren’t going to class or they’re not showing up for appointments.”

Despite the time and travel demands on the student-athletes, they have shown drive to succeed in the classroom. The women’s ski team led the department with a sensational 3.704 GPA, their 47th consecutive semester above 3.0.

Livingston has also seen commitment from the coaches, who have even shown competitiveness in the GPA of their teams.

“(Ann Elliott Whidden), the lacrosse coach, she was fired up, she was so excited to see her GPA (3.635), and then she’s upset because they finished third in the ranking,” Livingston said with a laugh. “So, the coaches are as competitive as a lot of us are, as the students are. But, kudos to the coaches for typically bringing in students who really want to succeed.”

For the football team, the fall was the first time the program has ever had a semester GPA of at least 3.0. The cumulative GPA of the players (3.083) is also a program record.

“It’s big for every coach to be involved, and for the football coach to have that control, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they have their highest GPA,” Livingston said. “It’s because Coach Prime is here and what he’s been doing.”

The success of the football team was further highlighted this week when star cornerback/receiver Travis Hunter, the Heisman Trophy winner, was named first-team Academic All-America for the second straight year by College Sports Communicators.

Hunter, who has a 3.79 GPA, was the Academic All-America team member of the year for Division I. Hunter is the first player in CU history to be a unanimous first-team All-American on the field and first-team Academic all-American.