FALL RIVER — Report card day causes zero stress for Chris Poliseno. Durfee High's girls' swimming and diving coach isn't about to lose any of these girls to bad grades.

At the team's end-of-season banquets, Poliseno annually hands out medals to his athletes who have achieved a grade point average of 3.25 or better. GPAs of 4.0 to 3.75 get gold; 3.74 to 3.5 get silver; 3.49 to 3.25 get bronze.

At the banquet last week at Durfee, Poliseno had the pleasure of giving medals to 23 of his 24 athletes, with the 24th, he reported, a near miss.  Since freshmen don't technically have a GPA until the end of the school year, Poliseno did his own math for ninth grader Mackenzie Reed and found she was a gold medalist.

As he was looking over his athletes' grades in preparation for the medal presentations, Poliseno had been dazzled. "I noticed a lot of very, very high GPAs," he said.

So high, he said, that he decided to add them. And divide. He did it all carefully. The calculator showed him a remarkable number.

The cumulative GPA for the Durfee High girls' swimming and diving team: 3.819.

"I haven't had numbers like that since I've been coaching," Poliseno, a physical education teacher at the high school, said on Friday night before refereeing the annual Durfee powder puff game at the Luke Urban Field House. "And they take hard classes. They do that and athletics. A lot of them take advanced placement classes. Our lowest GPA was 3.2. That's the first time I've seen that.

"And on top of that, they won the league (Big 3) championship."

Junior Melia Bouramia, a 100-yard freestyler and part of Durfee's sectional and state qualifying 200 freestyle relay team, is a gold medalist (3.9 GPA). She said she sensed there were other excellent students on the team, "but I didn't realize we had so many who are so dedicated to their education."

Poliseno has submitted his team's academic excellence to the National Interscholastic Swim Coaches Association so the Hilltoppers can be considered for the NISCA's National Scholar Team honor. To do so, Poliseno had to run his plan by Principal Matthew Desmarais, Guidance Director Drew Woodward and Athletics Director Brad Bustin.

"Very proud of them for all their hard work in the pool and in the classroom," Bustin wrote in a text. "They are a great example of what we expect from all our student/athletes."

Poliseno said it's not coincidence that so many of the athletes who are willing to dedicate themselves to the lung-burning and muscle-grinding sport of swimming and diving also excel in the classroom.

"I've always told people, my coaching philosophy is everything's connected," he said. "If you can hold your focus for six hours a day, and then come to practice, that's what a student-athlete is about."

"I enjoy going to practice. I give 100 percent," Bouramia said. "And school's important, so I give 100 percent."

Email Greg Sullivan at gsullivan@heraldnews.com. Follow him @GregSullivanHN.