HANOVER — Dartmouth College catcher Ben Rice has been selected as the most valuable player of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League.
Rice, a rising junior from Cohasset, Mass., made the most of his summer playing for the Worcester (Mass.) Bravehearts. He led the Futures League with 11 home runs, a .683 slugging percentage and a 1.150 on base-plus-slugging figure, playing in 35 of the Bravehearts’ 38 contests. He ranked third in batting average (.350), hits (43), runs batted in (27) and on-base percentage (.467).
The numbers were a big jump for Rice from his coronavirus-shortened sophomore campaign with the Big Green, where he held a .148 batting average in seven games.
“It felt good to get some good numbers in there,” Rice said in a Dartmouth news release. “It felt great to play every day. … I might have been a bit rusty at first, having not faced live pitching for about four months. But after a week or so, I felt more comfortable in the batter’s box and at the field. It has been a fun season, and I’m glad we’re headed to the championship this weekend.”
Worcester had a league-best 23-15 record in the regular season, a half-game ahead of the Nashua Silver Knights. The Bravehearts and Knights began the best-of-three Futures League championship series on Thursday night at Nashua’s Holman Stadium.
Cheryl Coletti-Lawson was up to her double-crossing ways again Wednesday.
The 54-year-old Henniker, N.H., resident and marathon swimmer completed the first-ever documented double-crossing of Newfound Lake on July 1, a 12.28-mile swim that took her just under nine hours. On Wednesday, she completed the first-ever documented double-crossing of Lake Sunapee, a 16-mile swim that took 12 hours and 40 minutes.
“It was 25% longer than I’ve ever done before, so I knew it was going to be a challenge,” Coletti-Lawson said. “But it was amazing. It was a beautiful day, and we got it done.”
She began the Sunapee swim at 5 a.m. in Newbury, N.H., crossing the lake to Georges Mills and back again. She had two kayakers accompany her, including the newest member of the team, her 13-year-old daughter Brianna Blake, an eighth-grader at Shaker Road School in Concord.
“At one point I was swimming along, the sun was up, and I’m looking to my right and seeing my daughter paddling the kayak and I thought, ‘What is better than this?’ ” Coletti-Lawson said.
Coletti-Lawson is done swimming for the season, but she has marathon swim plans for next year and beyond. She already swam the width of Lake Tahoe, a 12-mile jaunt, and next summer she’s planning to swim the length, which is 21 miles. She also has a spot reserved for In Search of Memphre, a 25-mile international swim on Lake Memphremagog between Newport, Vt., and Magog, Quebec.
Looking even further across the water, Coletti-Lawson has a spot reserved to swim the English Channel in 2023.
“Those are the long-term goals, but everything leads up to that,” Colette-Lawson said. “It’s all a journey.”