 Mercer has been cited by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for its community engagement and was among the 113 institutions listed on the 2015 President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction.Mercer has an NCAA Division I athletic program and fields teams in eight men's and ten women's sports; all university-sponsored sports compete in the Southern Conference except women's sand volleyball, which is not sponsored by the SoCon, and thus compete in the Atlantic Sun Conference.Mercer University was founded in Penfield, Georgia, as a boys' preparatory school under Billington McCarthy Sanders, a professor who served as the first president, and Adiel Sherwood, a Baptist minister who previously founded a boys' manual labor school that served as a model.