Terrapin swimming coach Jim Wenhold was shocked when he learned his men’s squad missed the cutoff in the NCAA’s first Athletic Performance Rating.

The team has a 3.11 GPA overall — considered well above average for Division I programs — and the most recent statistics had the team’s graduation rate at 75 percent.

But three athletes who left the program before this season with poor academic standing dropped the team’s APR to 900, below the NCAA’s cutoff score of 925. This earned the team the dubious distinction of being the university’s lowest-rated team on the campus.

“The bottom line is we are a strong academic team,” Wenhold said. “If you look at that one statistic, we had three guys screw up, but we also had a lot of guys do excellent.”

Two of those students were junior college transfers the program took a chance on academically because they didn’t require full scholarships to attend the university, said Wenhold, who could not legally disclose their names.

The team, which has only four scholarships this year, was unaware of the NCAA’s new retention snapshot when those athletes joined the program, Wenhold added.

The NCAA unveiled the new statistics Monday — which take into account retention rates and academic performance — but will not begin docking teams’ scholarship funding for missing the cut until after next season’s figures are reported.

Neither the men’s swimming nor men’s soccer team, which also missed the cut, would fall in line for sanctions this year, because their scores landed within the confidence interval set up by the NCAA to protect against statistical error with teams that have few participants.

The men’s soccer team’s score dropped below the NCAA cut line in part because two students who had good academic standing left the program before graduating to pursue professional careers, said Kathy Worthington, the assistant athletics director who oversees the academic support department.

Athletics Director Debbie Yow added that one of those student-athletes had a 3.6 GPA and was nine credits short of graduating but decided to postpone getting his degree. Department employees are not legally permitted to release names when speaking about students’ academic records.

For a team to lose a scholarship because of poor retention, it must have at least one athlete leave the program in poor academic standing and the APR must fall under the cut score and outside of the confidence interval, Yow explained.

“What we’re doing right now is going over the data to see why [two teams] missed the cut,” Yow said. “The next thing we’ll do is calculate what we need to happen by team for next year so they all hit the APR. I do think over the long haul this is going to be terrific.”

The APR score will be calculated on a rolling four-year average so occurrences of athletes turning pro before graduation will have less of an effect on scores.

Overall, 22 of the university’s 26 teams calculated had better APR scores than the average for Division I public institutions in their sport, and nine teams had perfect scores.

Several mistakes in the new data have already been addressed by the NCAA. The university’s women’s basketball team missed the cut according to the NCAA’s first release, but their score was changed after the university reported that it was calculated incorrectly.

“This [rating] is not a sign of poor academics,” Yow said. “But we are a member of the NCAA, and we need to try to hit the mark.”