In its third decade of honoring the nation’s best high school athletes, the Gatorade Company, in partnership with ESPN RISE, today announced Rachel Fox of Fort Bend Baptist Academy as its 2008-09 Gatorade Texas Softball Player of the Year.  Fox is the first Gatorade Texas Softball Player of the Year to be chosen from Fort Bend Baptist Academy.

Fox

The award, which recognizes not only outstanding athletic excellence but also high standards of academic achievement and exemplary character demonstrated on and off the field, distinguishes Fox as Texas’s best high school softball player.  Fox is now a finalist for the prestigious Gatorade National Softball Player of the Year award to be announced in June.

The 5-foot-4 junior pitcher led the Eagles (33-3) to the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools Class 4A state title this season.  A three-time TAPPS Class 4A First Team All-State selection, Fox finished the year with a 27-3 record and a 0.12 earned run average.  She struck out 352 batters and walked just eight, allowing 60 hits in 179.2 innings.  Fox held opponents to a .098 batting average, recording four no-hitters and two perfect games.  At the plate, she battled .453 with three home runs, 38 RBIs and a .632 slugging percentage.

Fox has maintained a B average in the classroom.  A member of FBBA’s American Sign Language Club and her local Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter, she has volunteered for an area food bank and the rebuilding of inner-city houses on behalf of Hearts and Hammers.

“She’s a small kid but she’s got a big dog’s bite in terms of how competitive she is,” said K.C. Jackson, Fox’s coach with the Impact Gold AAU team.  “She dominates everyone she faces.”

Fox has verbally committed to play softball on scholarship at the University of Texas beginning in the fall of 2010.

The Gatorade Player of the Year program annually recognizes one winner in the District of Columbia and each of the 50 states that sanction high school football, girls volleyball, boys and girls cross country, boys and girls basketball, boys and girls soccer, baseball, softball, and boys and girls track & field.  The selection process is administered by ESPN RISE, which works with top sport-specific experts and a media advisory board of accomplished, veteran prep sports journalists to determine the state winners in each sport.

Fox joins recent Gatorade Texas Softball Players of the Year Whitney Canion (2007-08, Aledo), Brittany Barnhill (2006-07, Northwest), and Kirsten Shortridge (2005-06, Keller) among the state’s list of former award winners.