St. John's University Athletics
Hopkins Named BIG EAST Baseball Player Of The Week
2/23/2009 12:00:00 AM | Baseball
Feb. 23, 2009
QUEENS, N.Y. - The BIG EAST Conference has announced that sophomore third baseman Greg Hopkins has earned baseball Player of the Week honors. It is the first career Player of the Week honor for Hopkins, who was named to the weekly honor roll once as a freshman in 2008. The accolade also marks the second-straight season in which a St. John's player has been named the Player of the Week following the opening weekend of play (Joe Witkowski, 2008).
Hopkins helped lead the Red Storm to a 2-1 record in the inaugural BIG EAST-Big Ten Challenge. The sophomore batted .538 (7-for-13) and added three doubles and a triple. Hopkins posted a team-best .923 slugging percentage, picked up two RBI and scored two runs. In a 15-6 win against Penn State in the season opener, Hopkins was 3-for-6 with a double, a triple and an RBI. The third baseman was 2-for-4 with two doubles and an RBI in an 18-3 win against Iowa and finished the weekend with a 2-for-3 day against Michigan.
St. John's also had four players selected to the CollegeBaseball360.com BIG EAST-Big Ten Challenge All-Tournament team. Hopkins, Danny Benedetti and Brian Kemp were named to the first team, while Tim Morris was an honorable mention.
As a team, St. John's batted .391 with 14 doubles, two triples and a home run. The Red Storm slugged .582 in outscoring the opposition 35-13 in the Challenge.
The Red Storm's 15 runs in the season-opener were the most on opening day since an 11-5 victory against Virginia Tech in 2000. St. John's had not totaled 33 runs through the first two games of a season since 1963 and had not tallied at least 15 runs in each of the first two games of a season since 1948.
