Knights DH Hicks earns top honors

D.J. Hicks was at the baseball team's optional lift on Monday afternoon when he found out that he was not only the Conference USA Hitter of the Week but also one of five student-athletes in the country to be Louisville Slugger's National Player of the Week.

"I'm definitely surprised," Hicks said. "Awards in the middle of the season you don't really hear too much about or even worry about,  but I'm glad to see that some of it paid off and I got a little reward."

On Tuesday, Hicks was named the Pro-Line Athletic Co-National Hitter of the Week by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association. He shares the title with Southeast Missouri State's Trenton Moses.

D.J. is very, very deserving of that honor," said head coach Terry Rooney. "Certainly last week but really the last couple weeks, he has really been in a hitting zone. He's been consistently doing well, but he's also come up as we call it in the clutch and hitting in the clutch on numerous occasions. He certainly has done a great job over the last few weeks."

UCF is off until Friday's home series-opener against Houston.

The

sophomore helped lead UCF to a 4-1 record this past week, headlined by a career-high six-RBI game against Florida Atlantic. He hit a two-run double and a three-run double in back-to-back innings.

On Wednesday, he hit a solo home run in 8-6 win over No. 5 Florida.

Hicks kept it up in UCF's weekend series at Memphis. In the opener, he singled in the tenth inning and Kevin Vasquez, who pinch-ran for Hicks, came around to score the winning run.

In the second game, his grand slam in the seventh put UCF on top, clinching the game and the series. The Knights started the game trailing 6-0 after the first inning.

Hicks went deep again in the finale, finishing 2-for-3 with his third home run of the week.

Hicks, who sat out last season due to a collapsed lung, learned a lot by sitting and watching.

"I came back this fall pretty much 100 percent," Hicks said. "Coach still had confidence in me. It was good and fun again; no one wants to sit out for a year. At the end of the day, taking a year out, you have to sit back and learn a lot more than playing every day, so it's good and bad."

Hicks now leads the Knights with a .356 batting average and his 10 home runs are second only to Jonathan Griffin, who hit his eleventh on Sunday.

"I've got enough friends and family that are teasing me and making sure it doesn't all go to my head, and we've got a couple days off to keep working so I can forget about it. But at the end of the day, if we keep playing the way we're playing we're going to be fine," Hicks said.

He added that his national recognition brings more attention to UCF and what the Knights believe is a top-25 team.

"That's going to motivate us as a team to keep working better with the spotlight on us," Hicks said. "It's going to be hard to be an underdog anymore if we're getting these kinds of awards."

What to Watch For

— Houston's Jordan Lewis. The lefty earned C-USA's Pitcher of the Week honors and will pitch against the Knights this weekend. Lewis (4-1) struck out 10 batters last Friday against East Carolina.

— Beau Taylor. After he snapped his UCF record-tying hitting streak, his batting average fell to well below .300. Since he dropped to the nine-hole in the lineup, his average has gone up. In last week's five-game week, he batted 9-for-17 and raised his average to .315.