BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – After helping lead LSU to a sweep of non-conference opponents in Nicholls and No. 6 Oklahoma, LSU junior Infielder Bianka Bell repeated as the Southeastern Conference Softball Player of the Week, while pitcher Carley Hoover was named the SEC’s Freshman of the Week the league announced today.
Through seven weeks of the 2015 softball season, an LSU player has earned one of the conference’s weekly honors six times as Bell becomes the first player in Tiger program history to earn the award in consecutive weeks as she now has two league weekly awards in her career. This is the first award for Hoover this season, as she joins fellow freshman hurler Allie Walljasper who earned the nod in the second week of the season.
In three games last week, Bell was nearly unstoppable at the plate, finishing the trio of contest with a .700 batting average at the plate with seven hits, nine RBIs and three runs scored against the Colonels and Sooners. Of those seven hits, three were home runs as she is now tied for the team lead with 12 on the season, slugging 1.700 with a .727 on-base percentage last week.
The Tampa native earned her second four hit game in her last three outings against Nicholls, driving in four, while in the series against OU she belted the only run of the game on a solo shot in game one, while earning her first multi-home run game of the season on Saturday in game two by hitting a three-run blast in the first inning, before hitting another solo home run later in the contest as she finished the week extending her hitting streak to a career-long 12 games.
In another solid performance against a ranked opponent, Hoover produced another one of her trademark outings as she held the Sooners, who came into the weekend with the best batting average in the country, to just two hits to cap her second shutout of the year to improve to 8-1 on the year.
Oklahoma hit just .091 against her, as the Clemson, South Carolina, native retired the side in four of the seven innings on the evening. OU had just three base runners reach in the contest, with only one making it to second base as she struck out five in her fifth complete-game effort of the year.
LSU is back in action on Tuesday, hosting the South Alabama Jaguars at 6 p.m. at Tiger Park in Baton Rouge.
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