Seniors Matt Mender and Jeff Weinfeld have been elected to the 2015 CoSIDA Academic All-America Division III Football Team in voting by members of the College Sports Information Directors of America.
 
Mender, a defensive tackle from Glens Falls, NY (Glens Falls HS) was elected to the First Team. Weinfeld, a punter from Newton,, MA (Newton North HS), was elected to the Second Team.
 
This is the second consecutive Academic All-America honor for Mender. He was a Second Team honoree in 2014 – and the only player from a New York State college chosen to the Division III team.
 
Since Rochester's first Academic All-America selection in 1976 (Michael Corp of football), Rochester has a total of 94 Academic All-America honors over its various sports. There have been 26 First Team Academic All-Americans, 43 Second Team Academic All-Americans, 20 Third Team honorees, and three accorded Honorable Mention Academic All-America status.
 

In addition to the national Academic All-America honors, senior offensive lineman Bruce McKenty (Fairport, NY/Fairport HS) was named to the Academic All-District Three First Team in the CoSIDA balloting. It is the second consecutive year that McKenty earned First Team Academic All-District First Team honors.
 
Mender started every game on the defensive line in 2015, registering a total of 63 tackles. He had 5.5 tackles for loss, including  half a sack. He was named First Team All-Liberty League in post-season voting by the league's head coaches.  
 
As a senior, he had 12 tackles against Springfield College in a 29-3 Rochester win and 11 tackles on Meliora (Homecoming) Weekend against Merchant Marine (a 24-17 victory).
 
He was a semifinalist for the 2015 National Football Foundation Post-Graduate Scholarship. He is a member of Alpha Eta Mu Beta, the national honor society for Biomedical Engineering. He works in the Audiotry Neuroscience Lab. Last summer, he did research work on Parkinson's Disease.
 
Mender is a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society and was a teaching assistant for a Biosystems course. He serves on the executive board of his campus fraternity and oversees the frat's work in community service. In September, he was named as a Garnish Scholar at Rochester, one of the top 10 senior student-athletes. He carries a cumulative GPA of 3.75 in biomedical engineering.
 
Weinfeld produced four punts of 50 yards or longer this season. He finished the year with a 34.4-yard average for 30 punts. He put three balls inside the 20, seven others resulted in fair catches by opponents, and one resulted in a touchback.
 
Away from the field, he is a chemical engineering major with a 3.94 cumulative GPA. He was a First Team Academic All-District honoree in 2014 and 2015 (like Mender). Both men were named to the Liberty League All-Academic Team for three consecutive years.
 
Weinfeld is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society and the University's Engineering Computational Fluid Dynamics Group. For the last three years, he had the highest cumulative GPA on the football team. In the spring of 2015, he was named to the Provost's Circle, which honors the top student-athletes in the junior class.
 
He did a summer internship at the University's Chemical Engineering Department writing computer programs. He served as a business process engineer at the U.S. Army Research Development & Engineering Center near home in Natick, Mass.
 
McKenty was an iron man on the offensive line for Rochester. Over his four-year career, he played in all three O-Line positions: guard, tackle, and center (which he moved to this year). He earned First Team All-Liberty League honors as a junior and senior. He was a Second Team honoree as a sophomore. He started 36 consecutive games on the line.
 
He did not allow a sack all season and earned a final O-Line grade of 92. Rochester had one of the premier offenses in the Liberty League in 2015, finishing with an average of 390.6 yards in total offense and second overall in scoring.
 
McKenty worked as an accounting intern locally. He has applied for the Simon Business School 3.2 MBA Program. He was an active team member in community service, volunteering his time for Food Link and United Way.