NEW ORLEANS – Following a series sweep at James Madison this past weekend, App State Softball juniors Makayla McClain and Sophie Moshos swept the Sun Belt Softball Weekly awards, the league announced Tuesday. McClain was named the Sun Belt Player of the Week for the second time this season, while Moshos garnered her first Sun Belt Pitcher of the Week honors.
For the second time this season, McClain garnered Sun Belt Player of the Week honors, making her the first player in the league this season to be named Sun Belt Player of the Week twice. The Mountaineers’ sweep of the Sun Belt weekly awards marks the first time that App State has done that since Katie Boyd and Ashley Stubbs swept the SoCon weekly awards on Feb. 23, 2009.
Makayla McClain | Sun Belt Player of the Week
McClain was electric at the top of the Mountaineer order against the Dukes as she batted 5-for-9 (.556 batting average), hit three homers and produced eight RBIs from the leadoff spot. She slugged 1.667 through the three games and walked four more times to accumulate an OPS of 2.359. Her three homers against the Dukes were the sixth-most in the country last week, while her 1.667 slugging percentage was the 11th-best in NCAA Division I.
She started the weekend with a bang by slugging a leadoff homer on the third pitch she saw on Friday and then bashed a solo homer in the fourth inning to mark her first career multi-homer game. On Saturday, McClain bested that performance with a career-best five-RBI day. She tallied a two-RBI single to open the scoring in Game 2 and then smoked a three-run homer high over the left-field wall as part of a seven-run inning by App State to take control and win the series. She fell a triple short of the cycle against the Dukes on Saturday. Starting every game at second base, McClain didn’t commit an error on 11 chances and made several running catches to save hits.
**********Makayla McClain is daughter of Mike McClain, a former pitcher in the San Diego Padres system, on the MLB level…**********
++++++++++Makayla McClain has a teammate on the APP State roster from Northwest Guilford High School, and that would be Bel Varadi…Freshman Greensboro, N.C. Northwest Guilford++++++++++
Bel is one of the hardest working female athletes that we have ever seen coming out of Guilford County…Makayla McClain began her career at Campbell, before settling in at APP State, in Boone….