Iwata earns another player of week award
University of Hawaii shortstop Jessica Iwata’s continued surge at the plate earned the senior her second Big West softball field player of the week award of the season.
Iwata claimed the honor for the second time in the past three weeks on Monday after hitting .500 with an .857 slugging percentage in four UH wins to close a California road trip.
She went 2-for-4 with a double in UH’s 8-1 win at Cal State Bakersfield a week ago and later went 5-for-6 with four RBIs in the final two games of a three-game sweep at Cal Poly over the weekend.
Iwata hit a game-tying home run in the fourth inning of the middle game of the Cal Poly series and drove in another run in UH’s 3-1 win. She went 3-for-3 and accounted for both RBIs in UH’s 2-1 win in the series finale on Saturday.
Iwata raised her season batting average to .313 and is hitting .386 with 15 RBIs in Big West play.
UH (37-8, 14-1) leads the conference standings and opens a three-game series against second-place Long Beach State (30-19, 12-6) on Friday at Rainbow Wahine Softball Stadium.
Damien grad still making an impact
A former Damien multi-sport athlete is still making an impact on the high school scene.
John DePonte, an 1988 graduate who competed in basketball, football, volleyball and track and field, was named the California state coach of the year last week, as well as the Northern California coach of the year by MaxPreps, after leading his Pleasant Grove High School basketball team to the Northern California Division I championship and the California state Division I title. The Eagles became the first school from the Sac-Joaquin Section to win the D-I state title.
Pleasant Grove beat Deer Valley 73-60 to win the Northern California title. Deer Valley’s team includes McDonald’s All-American Marcus Lee, who is 6-feet-10 and committed to Kentucky. Deer Valley also had Kendall Smith, who committed to UNLV. In the Cal state D-I championship game, Pleasant Grove beat Santa Monica 73-57.
DePonte, who graduated from Sacramento State, has been the coach at Pleasant Grove, located in Elk Grove, Calif., for the past five seasons.
He is the son of Norman DePonte, who was the captain of Farrington’s 1959 Territorial championship basketball team, which was the last Territorial champion of Hawaii.