ITA Rafael Osuna Sportsmanship Award
Tim Zeitvogel from Pepperdine University has been named the 2022 ITA Rafael Osuna Sportsmanship Award Winner.
Zeitvogel was an All-West Coast Conference first-team singles selection this season after receiving honorable mention accolades in 2019 and 2021. Zeitvogel was also an All-WCC doubles honorable mention recipient the last two seasons. He led the Waves to a WCC regular-season crown in 2021 and to NCAA Tournament berths in 2021 and 2022. This season, Zeitvogel has accumulated an overall singles record of 22-9 and a doubles record of 22-15. Overall, his cumulative singles record is 64-15 and his cumulative record in doubles is 47-36.
Zeitvogel, a mathematics major, graduated summa cum laude with a GPA of 3.99 and is a two-time CoSIDA Academic All-District nomination while being named to the WCC All-Academic first team in 2021. He was the 2022 Pepperdine Scholar-Athlete of the Year and 2022 Pepperdine Breakout Athlete of the Year after being a two-time ITA Scholar-Athlete and two-time Pepperdine Scholar-Athlete. Four times Zeitvogel was named to the WCC Commissioner’s Honor Roll. He also received the WCC Sportsmanship Award in 2020.
In the community, Zeitvogel is the President of the Waves Leadership Council (Student-Athlete Advisory Committee). Here, he represents the student-athlete voice on campus, in the West Coast Conference and on the NCAA stage. He is the student-athlete representative at the Executive Council Meeting of the WCC and one of two student-athlete representatives from the conference at the president's meeting.
Tim represented the West Coast Conference at the NCAA Leadership Forum in Houston, Texas, in November 2021. Tim is a member of the Pi Mu Epsilon Math Honor Society, the Math American Association (MAA) and the University Athletics Committee, which connects the athletic department with the larger university. He is also the managing director of Court4 GbR, a multi-sport facility in Germany.
In extracurricular activities, Tim started studying mathematics at 15 years old and was one of only 30 students in Germany who studied at a university while still in high school. In 2020, he completed mathematical research on the understanding of the second wave of the COVID-19 outbreak. Prior to that, he started as a research assistant where he analyzes the in-match dynamics on the outcome of a tennis match.
He still works on this today and has presented this at special sessions (Math in Sports) and at the world’s two largest math meetings (Joint Math Meeting in January 2021 and April 22, and Math Fest in August 2021). He also submitted a peer-reviewed article explaining the findings of this research in December 2021.