ST. PAUL, Minn. – Macalester College softball player Mackenzie Clarke (Redwood City, Calif./Sequoia) has been nominated for the prestigious NCAA Woman of the Year Award. Clarke is one of 577 women across all three divisions to be nominated for this prestigious award.

Rooted in Title IX, the NCAA Woman of the Year Award was established in 1991 to recognize graduating female student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves in academics, athletics, service and leadership throughout their collegiate careers.

Clarke graduated from Macalester in May after majoring in both international studies and political science. During her senior year she held an internship at Advocates for Human Rights, a legal non-profit in Minneapolis. Clarke also co-authored an academic research paper with Professor David Chioni Moore that was submitted for publication to the Journal of Postcolonial Literature. On campus, she served on the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) and was a Student-Athlete Mentor (SAM) while also participating in Macalester's LGBTQ+ student-athlete collective, Pride Athletes at Mac (PAAM).

On the softball diamond, Clarke earned All-MIAC honors as a junior and senior while playing first base. As a senior she ranked fourth in the MIAC with 29 runs batted in and registered 277 putouts, which ranks second on Macalester's single-season record list. Clarke, who recorded 104 hits in her career, posted a career batting average of .339 to rank 10th all-time at Macalester.

Clarke's academic honors include being named Academic All-MIAC three times and earning Easton/NFCA Division II All-American Scholar Athlete accolades in 2019 and 2021. In 2021, she was a part of a Scots' team that posted the highest team grade point average across all NCAA divisions (3.905).  

Conference offices will select their nominees for NCAA Woman of the Year. Each conference nominee will be notified by the NCAA, and all conference-round nominees will be announced on ncaa.org in August. Conference nominations are forwarded to the NCAA Woman of the Year Selection Committee, which identifies the top 10 honorees in each of the three NCAA divisions. From those 30 honorees, the selection committee then determines the three finalists in each division for a total of nine finalists.