Spring has sprung for the Leopards as Wentworth's spring atheltic teams are off to great starts and are in the midst of conference play...
The Leopard baseball team stands at 8-4 after defeating Lasell, 9-1, Thursday night. Wentworth is batting .321 as a team and Leopard pitchers have struck out 95 batters in 93 innings of work. Senior Pete Oggeri, who last Saturday became the 10th member of the 100-hit club, is batting .464 and has an impressive slugging percentage of .878 to pace the attack while senior pitchers Matt Dannenhoffer and Mo Gardner are each 2-0 and classmate Scott Borges has a school record three saves thus far. Oggeri was TCCC Player of the Week last week. A test comes this weekend with a pair of doubleheaders at Endicott (Saturday) and Roger Williams (Sunday).
Softball sits at 5-6 and is 2-1 since coming back from its spring trip. The Leopards dropped their Northern opener to Emmanuel before putting together a solid doubleheader sweep of Castleton last Sunday. Junior Lizz Harvey has belted three home runs so far, with two coming in consecutive at bats against Emmanuel. Harvey has a team-high 11 RBI, followed by junior Bridget Souza's seven, while Souza leads the team with a .367 batting average. Senior Caylee Johanson has a 4-5 record in the circle.
An exciting, 9-8 win over the University of New England in its home opener Wednesday night evened the lacrosse team's record at 2-2. Freshman Mark Pappas has 14 goals through four games while junior Matt Cox has 10 points on seven goals and three assists. The Leopards have won nearly 65 percent of their face-offs and face a tough test Saturday when they travel to two-time defending league champ Western New England.
Men's tennis has opened the 2010 season in convincing fashion, posting a 2-0 record without losing an individual match thus far. In the season opener against Regis, Wentworth dropped just one set the entire match. Senior Dan Alexander had a thrilling victory over Eastern Nazarene on Wednesday, as he dropped the first set 0-6 and came back to win the second set, 7-5, before taking the tiebreaker with a 10-7 score.
A sport that may get overshadowed because of its crossover nature, men's volleyball, deserves more than a passing mention. First-year head coach Rob Mullowney has guided his squad to a 15-8 record this season. The 15 wins are as many as the program achieved in the last three seasons combined. Junior Lowell Jesmer has 211 kills and a hitting percentage of .406 to pace a balanced attack. What is more impressive is that the Leopards returned very few players to this year's team.
Congratulations are in order for the ice hockey team as the Leopards became the seventh NCAA Division III statistical champion in school history as their power-play unit was the most efficient stat-wise this season. Wentworth, which had a game that featured seven power-play goals and another featuring six, converted 32.6 prcent of its extra man opportunities.
