The Iowa Athletics Department announced on Tuesday it will nominate wrestler Matt McDonough and field-hockey player Jessica Barnett for the Big Ten’s Male and Female Athlete of the Year awards.

This marks the seventh time Iowa has nominated a wrestler for the Jesse Owens Award and the eighth in which it backed a Hawkeye field-hockey player for the Suzy Favor Award. Three of the wrestlers — Ed Banach in 1983, Barry Davis in 1985, and Brent Metcalf in 2008 — took home the men’s conference honor; only one other Hawkeye, star QB Chuck Long in 1986, has won the award.

McDonough is a two-time Big Ten and NCAA champion at 125 pounds, most recently this past season. He won two matches at the U.S. Olympic wrestling trials in Iowa City last month.

Barnett was named an All-American after a 2011 campaign in which she finished second on the team with 11 goals and 24 points. She earned three conference Player of the Week awards, and she is the first Hawkeye since Gleason in 1992 to do so in a single season.

Winners will be decided by a panel of Big Ten media voters, according to a release, and the results will be announced late next month.

— by Seth Roberts