SuburbanOneSports.com recognizes a male and female featured athlete each week. The awards, sponsored by Univest, are given to seniors of good character who are students in good standing that have made significant contributions to their teams. Selections are based on nominations received from coaches, athletic directors and administrators.
Univest’s SuburbanOneSports.com Featured Female Athlete (Week of May 21, 2015)
Jenn Freeman is so quick with a quip at strange times that she openly wonders if her coach, Scott Ludlow, will even miss her when her fourth and final Upper Moreland softball season comes to an end. “I’m definitely a positive person,” she said. “At games, I just crack these random jokes. I don’t know if (Ludlow) can get rid of me quick enough.” In vintage form, Freeman is half serious and half joking – and it’s hard to immediately know where one begins and one ends. Unless you know her as well as Ludlow does. “There’s always moments with her,” said the Golden Bears’ coach. “That statement is exactly the kind of thing she would say. There is always a little bit of levity with her. She’s always good for a laugh. She’s a calming influence. She keeps everybody on the team level-headed. I will absolutely be sorry to see her go. Everybody will be sorry to see her go.”
Ludlow sees her happy-go-lucky spirit as a snapshot of what makes Freeman, who ranks second in her class, successful as a student-athlete and member of the Upper Moreland school community. “She has things in perspective,” the UM coach said. “She understands that it’s only softball. Don’t get me wrong. She plays hard and plays to win, but she also sees the big picture.” Freeman, who bats cleanup, boasted a .405 average, and Ludlow calls her one of the “best bunters” on the team. “She just kept maturing as a softball player,” he said. “Hitting-wise especially – just with her approach and her confidence. A lot has to do with the mental part of the game. She has a mental edge and approach. She never looks intimidated.”
Freeman will take her talents to Misericordia University where she will pursue a career in physical therapy. “I like helping people gain strength, and I like helping people get back to the sport they love,” said Freeman, who is involved in service-based activities such as Athletes Helping Athletes (president), Bear Buddies and a member of her church youth group. Her list of extracurricular activities ranges from the National Honor Society to the Environmental Club (vice president), but the main one is anything to do with German Culture (German NHS, German Club, German Partnership Program). “She’s just a really great kid,” Ludlow said. “She strives to do her best at everything she does. She’s never too high for the highs or too low for the lows. For as good as a softball player she is, she is that much better as a person and a student.”
To read Freeman’s complete profile, please click on the following link: http://www.suburbanonesports.com/featured-athletes/female/jenn-freeman-0053828
Univest’s SuburbanOneSports.com Featured Male Athlete (Week of May 21, 2015)
Torin Martutartus showed signs of possessing remarkable leadership qualities at a young age. “He was a sixth grade student in my class, and literally, when I put him in a group, he brought up the kids’ grades around him, and it wasn’t because they were copying off him,” Jon Pallone said. “He just came with such an attitude – he wanted to learn, and the kids saw how much he wanted to learn and how it can be fun. He’s a nice kid, he’s a likable kid, and the other kids said, ‘Hey, he’s studying, we’re going to do this too.’ I remember an old Simpsons episode where, at a parent-teacher conference, they showed the black hole where Bart sits, and every kid’s grade goes down the black hole the closer they sit to Bart. Torin is the opposite of that. Wherever he sits, everybody else does better because he’s focused. He’s just a great guy. He really is.”
Six years later, Pallone named Martutartus, now a senior, the first captain of his Quakertown baseball squad. “As their coach, you want to instill leadership in your guys, especially when some of the guys naturally have those qualities and you can build on it and hope that builds to some of the other guys as well,” he said. Pallone didn’t choose a captain by a vote of the players but rather he asked them to write down their thoughts on what direction they believed the team should be heading and how they could facilitate that leadership. “I wrote that we have to pinpoint what we have to work on and then go out there and practice – we can’t screw around,” Martutartus said. “Basically, we needed to let the playing talk for itself.” Pallone liked what he heard. “He saw us continually improving and saw a need for leadership from the players on the bench and on the field to push one another, just all the things you want in a guy that’s a captain,” the Panthers’ coach said. “He really rose up to that. He’s very mature and wise and a very smart kid.”
Baseball will not be part of the future for Martutartus, unless he competes at the club level. Academics came first, and he chose Penn State University from an impressive list of schools – he also was accepted at the University of Maryland, the University of Cincinnati, North Carolina State, University of Illinois and Virginia Tech. The vice president of National Honor Society, he was enrolled in five AP classes this year. At Penn State this fall, he plans to major in aerospace engineering. “Honestly, I would love to either work for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or one of the top aviation companies and design either some sort of spacecraft or aircraft that could advance humanity’s understanding of space and undiscovered aspects of the universe,” he said.
To view Martutartus’s complete profile, please click on the following link: http://www.suburbanonesports.com/featured-athletes/male/torin-martutartus-0053830
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