ARLINGTON, Texas – Former Southern Utah University women’s basketball student-athlete Alexa Lord and former Seattle University men’s tennis student-athlete Julian Worn have been selected as the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) Stan Bates Award winners for the 2023-24 academic year.
 
Named in honor of former WAC Commissioner Stan Bates (1971-80), the annual award is given to one male and one female student-athlete who have demonstrated excellence in academic achievement, athletic accomplishment and exceptional character and community engagement. A $10,000 postgraduate scholarship is endowed to the winners.
 
Lord, a native of Richfield, Utah, graduated with a 4.0 GPA and bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Southern Utah in 2023. Lord also pursued an MBA with an emphasis in healthcare administration during a postgraduate women’s basketball season in 2023-24. Lord was included on the Academic All-WAC team in 2022-23 and 2023-24 after being named to the Big Sky All-Academic team the prior two years and received the 2023 R. Kenneth Benson Award, the most prestigious student award at Southern Utah that recognizes academic excellence, outstanding leadership and dedication to service.
 
Lord appeared in 114 games over five seasons at Southern Utah, averaging 3.4 points and 2.9 rebounds per game for the Thunderbirds. Lord’s 2023-24 graduate season totals of 6.1 points and 5.6 rebounds per game, along with a 48.1 percent field goal percentage, were all career highs. Lord was also a member of the 2022-23 Hercules Tires WAC Basketball Tournament champion Southern Utah team that earned the first NCAA Tournament berth in program history.
 
Away from the basketball court, Lord was the 2023-24 athletics representative on the Southern Utah Student Associate Senate and was a conference representative on the WAC Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) for two years. Following a service mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Lord is slated to begin studying at the nationally top-10 ranked Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in the summer of 2026.
 
Worn, a native of Frankfurt, Germany by way of Singapore, graduated Summa Cum Laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Seattle U in the winter of 2023. Worn was awarded the Rev. Edmund B. McNulty, S.J., Award by the Seattle U College of Science and Engineering, presented to an outstanding engineering or computer science student and judged on the qualities of scholarship, leadership, dedication and inspiration of the founding Dean of the College. Worn was a four-time Academic All-WAC team selection and was a 2024 College Sports Communicators (CSC) Academic All-District choice.
 
Worn was a four-time all-conference tennis player at Seattle U, claiming WAC honorable mention singles accolades in 2021, first-team doubles and second-team singles all-conference honors in 2023 and second-team singles all-conference plaudits in 2024. Worn added three weekly conference citations during his Redhawks career.
 
Outside of tennis, Worn secured a postgraduate internship at the Allen Institute in Seattle in the neural dynamics section of the research organization. One of the main goals of the neural dynamics research group is working toward the development of a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.