Junior infielder Chad Zurcher today became the first Tiger baseball player to earn Conference USA Player of the Year honors. Zurcher enters this week’s C-USA tournament in Pearl, Mississippi, with a .455 batting average, tops in the entire country. He also leads the NCAA in on-base percentage (.560), having been hit by a pitch no fewer than 16 times.
The last Tiger to earn a league’s Player of the Year trophy was Mark Little in the Great Midwest Conference in 1994. (Little was later a member of the 2000 Pacific Coast League champion Memphis Redbirds.) Zurcher is the first Tiger since 2007 (Joey Lieberman) to be named first-team all-conference.
A pair of Tiger juniors — infielder T.J. Rich and outfielder Drew Martinez — were named second-team all-conference.
The Tigers’ opening game of the C-USA tourney will be at 9 a.m. Wednesday against UCF.
