SPARTANBURG, S.C. – ETSU tennis player Laylo Bakhodirova and Western Carolina volleyball player Merry Gebel are the Southern Conference’s nominees for the 2023 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
 
Since 1991, The NCAA Woman of the Year program has recognized graduating female student-athletes for excellence in academics, athletics, community service, and leadership throughout their college careers.
 
Bakhodirova ended her five-year ETSU career in storybook fashion, going from an 8-10 record from the top flight her freshman year to an ITA ranking, an 18-4 singles record from the top spot and SoCon Player of the Year honors as a senior in 2023.
 
On top of her first-team all-conference honors in singles and doubles, the native of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, also earned the ITA Ohio Valley Region’s Most Improved Senior award. On the conference level, she broke the ETSU record for most SoCon Student-Athlete of the Week awards with three and became the first non-Furman player to win at least seven weekly awards from the SoCon, including four in 2023.
 
Academically, Bakhodirova earned honors from multiple organizations. This includes the Pinnacle Award, which is granted to the player with the highest undergraduate GPA on a SoCon championship-winning team. She was also named to the College Sports Communicators (CSC) Academic All-District Team and earned academic honors from the ITA earlier this month.
 
A culmination of all her awards on the court and in the classroom, her peers voted her for the 2023 ETSU Legacy Award, which is given to one male and one female across all sports.
 
Gebel became the first player in program history during the 2022 season to earn AVCA All-America status after becoming just the second Catamount in the program’s history to earn SoCon Player of the Year honors in 2022. She added AVCA All-Southeast Region honors to her litany of awards. The Wildwood, Missouri, product earned her fourth All-SoCon plaudit with a first-team honor in 2022, while also landing on the conference’s all-tournament team at the end of the year. Gebel finished her five-year career second all-time in program history with 1,693 kills and ranks fifth in the record book with 1,461 digs on the defensive end. She closed her time in Cullowhee, North Carolina, by setting the program record with 507 total sets played. 
 
An outside hitter, Gebel led Western Carolina during the 2022 regular season with 340 kills and 3.37 kills per set, the fifth-best seasonal average in the SoCon in garnering the conference's top player award. 
 
A strong classroom performer, Gebel was honored following the 2022 season with CSC Academic All-District honors for the second time in her career. She was named to both the Fall Academic All-Southern Conference team and the SoCon’s Academic Honor Roll four times, equaling that total in receiving the Commissioner’s Medal for boasting a GPA over 3.8 each year. She appeared on the WCU Dean’s List seven times over her five-year career and was on the Chancellor’s List a total of six times.
 
Gebel additionally served two terms as the president of WCU’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) where she helped spearhead community involvement for Catamount student-athletes including the inaugural “Back the Cats” initiative won by the women’s golf team in 2022-23. Among her community service efforts were team-led volunteering with the Jackson County Christmas Connection and through her family’s fundraising charity, The Snow Foundation, which raises money to support research for Wolfram Syndrome.
 
Conference offices can recognize two nominees if at least one is a woman of color or an international student-athlete. All nominees who compete in a sport not sponsored by their school's primary conference, as well as associate conference nominees and independent nominees, will be placed in a separate pool to be considered by a selection committee.
 
A record-breaking 619 female student-athletes were nominated by NCAA member schools for consideration of the 2023 Woman of the Year award. This year’s nominees represent a diverse set of well-rounded student-athletes, with 24 different sports across all three NCAA divisions. Within the nomination pool, 264 nominees competed in Division I, 128 in Division II, and 227 in Division III. The average GPA of the nominee pool is 3.76.
 
The Woman of the Year Selection Committee, made up of representatives from the NCAA membership, will choose the Top 30 honorees — 10 from each division — from the conference-level nominees. The Top 30 honorees will be announced in October. The selection committee will then determine the top three honorees in each division from the Top 30, and the nine finalists will be announced in November. From those nine finalists, the NCAA Committee on Women's Athletics will choose the 2023 NCAA Woman of the Year. The honorees will be celebrated at the Woman of the Year Award Ceremony at the NCAA Convention in Phoenix in January.