WALLA WALLA, Wash. – Eight Whitman College student athletes are the latest recipients of athletic achievement awards given annually by the athletic department.
Each spring, the Whitman Department of Sports Studies, Recreation, and Athletics (SSRA) staff presents one male and one female from each class with Most Outstanding Performer awards. The 2006-07 winners were announced, along with a number of other awards, at a recent Whitman Athletics Banquet in the Reid Campus Center.
Rachel Walker of the women's alpine ski team and Phalkun Mam of the men's tennis team are the senior class winners this spring. The senior awards are given in honor of the late Max Seachris, a baseball coach and athletic director, and Lee Coleman, a retired swim coach. Coleman was at the banquet as a 2007 inductee into the Whitman Athletics Hall of Fame.
For the first time, the award for the top female athlete in the junior class was given in honor of Jayne McCarthy, who retired from the Whitman coaching ranks in 2000 after 14 seasons at the helm of the women's tennis team. McCarthy, a four-time Northwest Conference coach of the year, was a guest at the banquet and presented the first McCarthy Award to Kristen Berndt, who led the Whitman women's soccer team in scoring last fall for a third consecutive season.
Clint Collier, a member of the swim team, is this year's male winner in the junior class award, which is given in memory of former tennis and basketball coach Bob Burgess.
Other winners of the Most Outstanding Performer awards this spring are sophomores Rosa Brey (volleyball) and Chris Faidley (basketball), and first-year athletes Devon Spika (Nordic skiing) and Matt Solomon (tennis).
Phalkun Mam, a graduate of McKay High School in Salem, Ore., finished a stellar four seasons as Whitman's career leader in tennis victories. This spring, Mam rose as high as No. 4 in the NCAA Div. III national singles rankings and was voted Northwest Conference Player of the Year. He led the Missionaries to an undefeated NWC regular season, a No. 12 national team ranking and a berth in the national championship tournament.
Last fall, Mam won the Intercollegiate Tennis Association's Northwest regional singles title and placed fifth at the National Small College Championships.
Rachel Walker, a graduate of British Columbia's Whistler Secondary School, capped her senior season by placing 12th in the giant slalom at the NCAA West Region Championships. Outskiing some of the best young skiers in the world, including those on athletic scholarships at several NCAA Div. I schools, Walker paced the Missionary women’s team to a sixth-place finish in the team scoring. The Whitman women finished ahead of the University of New Mexico, Montana State and Western State.
Despite her strong individual finish, Walker wasn’t able to qualify for a return trip to the NCAA National Championships. She competed at nationals in two of her previous seasons.
Kristen Berndt, a graduate of Mount Si High School in Snoqualmie, Wash., capped her junior soccer season by earning a spot on the first-ever All-American Team chosen by the D3Kicks.com website. She also made the NCAA Div. III All-West Region First Team, as selected by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America, and was named to the All-Northwest Conference First Team for a second consecutive year.
Berndt scored 12 goals and had four assists during her junior campaign. She led the NWC in shots taken and finished second in scoring.
Clint Collier, a graduate of St. Pius X High School in Albuquerque, N.M., made the finals in three events at the Northwest Conference Championships, placing seventh in the 100-yard backstroke, eighth in the 200-yard breaststroke, and eighth in the 200-yard medley. It marked the third time in his three seasons that Collier has posted top 10 efforts in three events at the conference meet.
A two-year captain, Collier has the second-best time ever clocked at Whitman in the men's 100-yard breaststroke.
Rosa Brey, a graduate of Bozeman (Mont.) High School, emerged as a dominant player in Northwest Conference volleyball. A 5-foot-10 middle blocker, she twice earned NWC Player of the Week honors during the fall season and was voted to the All-NWC Second Team. In 16 NWC matches, Brey ranked third in hitting percentage, fifth in blocks and seventh in kills. For the entire season, she averaged 1.04 blocks per game, the second-best mark in the conference.
Brey, who served as a team captain as a sophomore, has now won Outstanding Performer awards in each of her first two seasons at Whitman.
Chris Faidley, a 6-foot-2 guard for King's High School in Seattle, earned All-NWC Honorable Mention recognition after averaging 16.9 points per game, the third-best mark in the conference. He led the NWC in total three-point baskets with 91 -- a new single-season school record at Whitman. He was named conference Player of the Week ater making 16 three-pointers in two weekend games, one of them a victory in Tacoma that snapped Puget Sound's 33-game home winning streak.
For the season, Faidley shot 40.8 percent from the three-point line and led Whitman in steals.
Devon Spika, a graduate of Denmark's Copenhagen International School, qualified for the NCAA National Ski Championships in her first season with the Whitman Nordic team. In a championship competition that included qualifiers from all NCAA Div. I, II and III schools, Spika placed 19th in the classic and 26th in the freestyle. Spika, who has dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship, placed fifth in the freestyle and seventh in the classic at the NCAA West Regional.
Spika qualified for nationals as the 10th seed from the west region, which includes a number of NCAA Div. I schools, including the universities of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Nevada.
Matt Solomon, a graduate of St. Stephen's School in Austin, Texas, made an immediate impact with a men's tennis team that rolled to a 16-0 regular season record in the Northwest Conference and climbed to No. 12 in the NCAA Div. III national rankings. Solomon played most of the season at No. 4 singles, although he played in the No. 1 slot in some matches during the season.
Solomon got his freshman season off to a strong start last fall, teaming with freshman Nadeem Kassam to with Intercollegiate Tennis Association's west region doubles title.