FSU Athletics celebrates spring ceremonies for 2019 graduates

While FSU has their sports teams putting in that work this weekend, some of the top athletes in the school are walking across the stage to receive degrees.

While some of the top athletes in garnet and gold are lacing up their Nikes and getting into action this weekend – the FSU baseball team hosting Pitt while the beach volleyball team is playing for a national championship – a select group of other top Seminoles are putting on their dress shoes or heels and preparing to shake hands.

It has nothing to do with a job interview, but more of a right of passage as plenty of top Noles from the field are going to become graduates of Florida Stat University by the end of the weekend as the school holds its annual spring commencement ceremonies inside the Tucker Center on Friday and Saturday.

Thousands of students from both the undergraduate and graduate programs at FSU will take part in the events, and several of the sports teams took a moment to shout out their graduates that will be taking part – including longtime basketball coach Leonard Hamilton, who helped lead the Noles to back-to-back second weekend showings in the annual NCAA Tournament.

One of the bigger stories with this graduation time was about a player who shined for the FSU football team…back during the national title season in 2013, as former wide receiver Kenny Shaw was back on campus to take part in the graduation fun as he walked across the stage to receive his degree from FSU.

"“You progress as you go through life,” he said. “You just evolve and you find out that you’re more than ball. I call it a different accolade. I was aiming for a different accolade.“Because when you get all the sports accolades, you can pile them up. But, at the end of the day, I feel like it’s about what character accolades you’ve got. And that’s what carries you in life.”"

This weekend’s events marked the 72nd year that FSU has held graduation ceremonies dating back to the first time they took place during the 1947-48 academic year, the first year that the school became co-educational again and allowed both men and women to take classes at the school.

As one of the thousands of people who walked across the Tucker Center stage and became a graduate of FSU, I want to say congrats to all that did so this weekend – and to all that have done it before and will be doing it again in the near future.