Lemire’s Hitting Fuels Notre Dame Win Streak

Notre Dame junior Lizzy Lemire, who played at Woodbridge High, was named Big East Conference softball player of the week recently, contributing to the Fighting Irish’s current 11-game win streak. Lemire batted .636 in four games. She went seven for 11 with two runs, a home run and a four runs batted in.

Against Big East opponent Pittsburgh on April 22, Lemire went five for six (.833), scored a run and had two RBIs. She also hit a two-run home run on April 18 in the bottom of the seventh in a loss to Indiana State, preventing the 19th-ranked Fighting Irish from being shut out for the first time this season.

Lemire, a left fielder, started all 55 regular-season games for the Irish, and batted .331 with eight doubles and 30 RBIs heading into last weekend’s Big East tournament.

Notre Dame (46-12), which won the Big East regular-season title for the fifth consecutive year and tied a school record for best regular-season winning percentage, won last weekend’s conference tournament.

YOUNG IVY

Former Novaquatics swimmer Heidi Kraus, who helped Irvine High to three Southern Section Division I swimming championships, recorded Yale’s top times in the 500 (4:57.83), 1,000 (10:29.42) and 1,650-yard (17:03.29) freestyle events. In the Ivy League Championships, she placed fifth in the 1,650 freestyle (17:03.29), seventh in the 500 freestyle (4:57.83) and 12th in the 200 butterfly (2:06.40).

The women’s 1,600-meter relay team at Harvard, which included freshmen Amanda Shanklin (Santa Margarita) and Ashley Furst (Laguna Hills) running the first two legs, won the Heptagonal competition at the Penn Relays track and field championships with a time of 3:50.56.

MORE BALL

Concordia softball catcher Dawn Davidson (Foothill High) was selected Golden State Athletic Conference player of the week on May 1 and also earned all-conference honors. She helped the Eagles (25-27) to their best record in five seasons with nine stolen bases and a .266 batting average.

Mandy Rockwell (Los Alamitos High/Cypress College), a pitcher for the first-year softball team at Louisville, is 7-4 with a 1.33 earned-run average. Rockwell recorded 64 victories, second in school history, in two seasons at Cypress.

Former Esperanza and Cypress College catcher Brandon Pack is among 40 finalists for the Johnny Bench National Collegiate Catcher of the Year award. He is batting .307 with 15 home runs and 61 runs batted at South Carolina going into Saturday’s regular-season finale against Arkansas.

It has been another tough season at Santa Clara, where former Marina standout Marcy Crouch is finishing her first season as a college softball coach.

The Broncos are 10-37. They were 13-54 last season.

NOTABLE

Kevin Augustine, the Times’ Orange County boys’ basketball player of the year in 1996, has committed to play at Nebraska, according a report in the Lincoln Star Journal. Augustine originally signed with USC in 1997, then left the team in his sophomore season and has been attending Fullerton College, where he did not play basketball.

Dan Galvanoni, who played at Capistrano Valley High, signed to play basketball at Fairfield in Connecticut after two seasons at Moorpark College.

The Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference named San Francisco State senior Terry Tuzzolino as its wrestler of the year. Tuzzolino, from Capistrano Valley High and Santa Ana College, was the NCAA Division II champion at 197 pounds and had a 33-6 record.