ST. LOUIS – The Great Lakes Valley Conference announced on Friday (May 19) that the University of Missouri-St. Louis's Charlotte Richards has been selected as the female recipient of the 2023 Richard F. Scharf Paragon Award.

The Richard F. Scharf Paragon Award was established prior to the 1990-91 season in honor of Richard F. Scharf, Commissioner Emeritus of the GLVC. It is awarded annually to one male and one female student-athlete, based upon academic excellence, athletic ability and achievement, character and leadership.

Richards will be formally recognized Tuesday, May 23, at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car GLVC Awards Reception in St. Charles, Missouri.

She is the first female student-athlete and second overall student-athlete from Missouri-St. Louis to win the GLVC's most prestigious honor. The other recipient for the Tritons came in 2003-04, when baseball player Logan Hughes took home the award.

The outside hitter earned a plethora of awards in her final season at UMSL, including GLVC Player of the Year, AVCA Midwest Region Player of the Year, All-GLVC First Team, AVCA and D2CCA All-America First Team, and Midwest Region All-Tournament team. In Conference matches, she led the league in points per set (4.70), kills per set (4.14), total attacks (1394), and total kills (174), while finishing top 15 in NCAA Division II in total kills (8th), total attacks (8th), point per set (11th), and kills per set (13th). Richards helped her squad to a 25-7 record, winning the NCAA Midwest Region and reaching the NCAA Semifinals.

After a five-year career and 514 sets played, Richards leaves the Tritons as one of the greatest volleyball players in program history. The three-year captain won three GLVC Player of the Year awards, was a First Team AVCA All-American twice and Second Team once and was named GLVC Offensive Player of the Week five times. Her best statistical season came in 2021, when she led both the Conference and NCAA in total kills with 569, a single season program record. Richards also tops the UMSL record books in single season kill attempts (1704, 2021), career kills (1931), and career kill attempts (5893). Her 133 career service aces are fifth-best in Triton history, as well. In her five seasons, UMSL had a 109-39 overall record and 60-20 Conference mark, finishing runner-up twice in the GLVC Tournament (2019, 2021) and appearing in the NCAA Tournament three times (2019, Fall 2021, 2022).

In the classroom, Richards was nearly perfect, earning her undergraduate degree in Supply Chain Management with a 3.97 GPA and Master's in Supply Chain Data Analytics with a 4.0 GPA. She received Academic All-GLVC honors all four years, GLVC Volleyball Scholar-Athlete of the Year twice (2021, 2022), and First and Second Team Academic All-America once apiece. The Cedar Rapids, Iowa native appeared on the Dean's List seven times and claimed the Brother James Gaffney Distinguished Scholars award twice in her time at UMSL. She was also enrolled in the Pierre Laclede Honors College, which is a certificate program that top academic students can apply to.

To go along with her impressive athletic and academic resume, Richards was involved in both on-campus activities and in the community. She was a member of the UMSL Supply Chain Management Club and worked on campus in the Millennium Student Center for Events Services for three years. Over the 2022 summer, she volunteered with several organizations through her Boeing internship in Seattle, Wash., including Special Olympics, Ronald McDonald House, and a local food pantry.