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Men’s Basketball: Four UC Irvine players earn Big West honors

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The UC Irvine men’s basketball team had four players honored by the Big West Conference men’s basketball coaches, led by senior guard Daman Starring, who was named second-team All-Big West.

Senior post Adam Folker earned the conference’s Hustle Award for the second straight season, while sophomore forward Will Davis was named Defensive Player of the Year.

UCI point guard Alex Moore shared Freshman of the Year laurels with Hawaii’s Isaac Fotu.

Starring, a 6-foot-3 guard who enters Thursday’s Big West Tournament averaging 13.3 points, had six 20-point outputs for the Anteaters (18-14, 11-7 in conference, good four fourth place). He has 1,012 career points at UCI, where he played three seasons after transferring from Centenary, and ranks seventh in school annals with 144 career three-pointers.

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Starring is averaging 3.9 rebounds and 1.9 assists per contest.

The 6-9 Folker, a fifth-year senior, led all Big West players in field-goal percentage (.581). He averaged 9.8 ppoints and 6-4 rebounds in the regular season.

Davis led the conference with 78 blocked shots, which also broke his own school single-season record. The lanky 6-8 standout has 133 blocks in 62 games at UCI, which will face Hawaii on Thursday at approximately 8:30 p.m. at Honda Center.

Davis averaged 8.6 points and a team-best 6.6 rebounds.

Young, a 6-1 newcomer out of Phoenix, has a school single-season freshman record 132 assists. He ranks second in the conference in assists (4.1 per game) and assist-to-turnover ratio (2.6). He is averaging 9.2 points per game and his 28 three-pointers rank third on the squad.

UCI’s 11 conference wins are the most for the program in 10 seasons and the 18 wins are the most since the 2007-08 team finished 18-16.

Folker received honorable mention in the all-conference voting.

Long Beach State senior James Ennis was the Player of the Year and the 49ers Dan Monson was Coach of the Year.

Kyle Boswell, a UC Santa Barbara sophomore out of Edison High in Huntington Beach, was named Sixth Man of the Year.

— From staff reports

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