KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) announced its all-district performers, which were selected and voted on by member coaches of NCAA Division II, on Monday morning and among the 89 student-athletes recognized for their on-court achievement during the 2020-21 season was Southern Arkansas Men's Basketball's Aaron Lucas who earned a spot on the outlet's South Central All-District First Team.
 
Lucas, a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, becomes the first Mulerider Men's Basketball player to be named to an all-district/all-region first team in the program's NCAA Era and just the third player to earn the honor since 1995-96. He joins Marcus Norwood (1997-98) and Shawn Mason (2000-01) who both earned NCAA All-South Region Second Team honors during their respective careers as Muleriders.
 
Monday's honor for the 2020-21 Great American Conference Player of the Year (program's first) and GAC Defensive Player of the Year (program's second honoree) comes on the heels of one of the most successful team seasons by SAU in over three decades and in turn one of the more dominant individual seasons by a Mulerider Men's Basketball player in recent memory as Lucas became the first GAC men's hooper to earn both league POY and DPOY honors in the same season.
 
Lucas helped lead the Muleriders to a 15-6 record overall, a 12-4 mark in the highly competitive GAC Eastern Division, a GAC Eastern Division Co-Championship (program's first share of an NCAA regular season title), a GAC Tournament Championship Game appearance (first NCAA conference tournament title game appearance) and the program's first-ever NCAA Tournament berth.
 
Individually, the point guard led Southern Arkansas in scoring with a GAC-best 17.1 points per game. He scored 360 points and in 18 of SAU's 21 games he delivered with double-figure scoring which included 15 games with 15 or more points and six games with 20 or more points. He is the third player in Andy Sharpe's nine years as head coach at SAU to reach the 1,000-point scoring mark and the seventh player since 1995-96. Lucas eclipsed the record in a road win at Henderson State on February 6.
 
Lucas shot 45.8% from the floor, an impressive 42.3% from beyond-the-arc and made just under 80% of his attempts from the charity stripe. His 115 field goals made were tops in the GAC and he knocked down 52 attempts from three-point range.
 
If he wasn't scoring, he was facilitating. Three other players finished the season with a double-figure scoring average as Lucas averaged 4.5 assists per game, while totaling 95 for the season; the 26^th-most in Division II. He delivered a career-high ten assists with a double-double effort in the Muleriders' GAC semifinal win at Oklahoma Baptist. For his career, Lucas has recorded 358 assists; the second-most by a Mulerider in a Division II career.
 
Lucas was just as effective on the defensive end of the floor as he grabbed the second-most steals in the country with 54. His 2.57 steals per game average ranked 7^th in Division II and in 16 games he recorded at least two steals and on two occasions he collected five or more steals which included Lucas tying his own GAC Tournament single-game record of six steals in the road win over Oklahoma Baptist. Forty-six of his 62 rebounds came on the defensive end of the floor as well.
 
By earning first team honors, Lucas advances to the NABC All-America ballot which will be announced on Tuesday, March 23.