Mike Vukovcan It’s time to announce our second Lisa McCoy Agency/State Farm Insurance Hopewell Player of the Week, for both baseball and softball.
The winner will receive a baseball or softball with their Player of the Week inscription on it, along with a gift card to Shulligan’s Sports Bar & Grille.
The winners will be selected from either the High School, Junior Varsity or Middle School program. These Player of the Week honors will all lead up to Vikings Sports Now announcing a Player of the Year in both sports.
We unveiled this last week with our first winners being Allison Ramaley and Charlie Smetana.
As was the case last week, choosing the winners for this week wasn’t easy because we had plenty of outstanding performances.
Because of that and with the fact that the HS baseball team, essentially has a bye week this coming week, VSN is going to name multiple winners for baseball and a single winner for softball.
Let’s start with softball and our Week 2 winner is going to be freshman pitcher Isabella Cipolla.
Hopewell’s Bella Cipolla
Cipolla was on the mound and pitched an outstanding game as the Hopewell HS Softball team defeating Ellwood City, 4-2, which was their first win of the season.
Cipolla pitched 5 innings, allowing just 2 hits, 2 ER and struck out 3 batters.
When trying to select the winner for baseball, this was extremely difficult and nearly impossible to select only 1 winner.
Because of that, VSN is going to pick spend a little more money and name tri-winners: senior pitcher Kingston Krotec, sophomore outfielder James Armstrong and 8th grader Ryder Kostrick.
Considering the following, how can only 1 person win?
Kostrick led the Hopewell Middle School team to a 5-0 win over Beaver. The right-handed pitcher tossed a complete-game NO-Hitter, going 5 innings, 0 hits, 0 runs, 0 walks and struck out 7 batters.
Hopewell’s Ryder Kostrick
Then you have Krotec, who led the HS team to a 11-0 win over North Catholic on Wednesday afternoon. The senior RHP pitched a 5 innings, 0 ER and 7 K’s. At the plate this week, Kingston was 4-10 with 5 RBI’s.
In his 3 starts this season, Krotec has pitched 19 innings (3 complete games) and has yet to allow an earned run, walking just 2 batters, while striking out 25.
Finally, you had the incredible week from Armstrong.
In 3 games this past week, Armstrong went 9-for-13, with 5 runs scored and 6 RBI. That included a game against North Catholic in which he went 6-for-6 with 3 runs and 3 RBIs.
Hopewell’s James Armstrong
Currently, Hopewell has a record of 6-3 and 4-2 in the section, which is tied for second place with Beaver.
For the season, Armstrong is batting .552 with 17 hits, has scored 12 runs, driven in 9 runs and has a .618 on-base percentage from the leadoff spot.
