Aug. 5, 2008
LAS VEGAS - Baseball standout Xavier Scruggs has been named the 2008 UNLV Sportsman of the Year, while women's tennis star Elena Gantcheva won the Sportswoman of the Year award for the second straight year, UNLV Athletics announced Tuesday.
Scruggs, a junior on the 2008 Rebel squad, was named a second team Louisville Slugger All-American and was the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association's District VII Player of the Year.
Scruggs was also named the Mountain West Conference's Player of the Year after winning the league's triple crown. He led the league in home runs with 20, batting average with .379 and RBI with 65. He also led the MWC in slugging percentage (.778), on-base percentage (.489) and total bases (168).
Scruggs became just the second UNLV player ever to be named the MWC Player of the Year and was also just the second player in league history to earn the triple crown. He also was the first Rebel player to hit 20 home runs in a season since 1989.
Scruggs was drafted in the 19th round of the 2008 Major League Baseball Draft, taken by the St. Louis Cardinals with the 575th pick overall. He is currently playing with the Batavia Muckdogs in the Class A short-season New York-Penn League.
Gantcheva led her team to its first automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament since 2002 and she qualified for the NCAA Singles and Doubles Championships. She and her teammate became the first doubles team in school history to go to more than one NCAA Tournament and she finished the season ranked 35th in the nation in both singles and doubles.
Gantcheva became the MWC's first three-time winner of the Player of the Year award when she was named the 2008 winner as a senior. The first team All-MWC Singles and Doubles selection also won the match that clinched UNLV's 2008 MWC Tournament Championship.
This past season Gantcheva was named MWC Player of the Week four times, which gave her a league-record nine such honors in her career. Her .752 career singles winning percentage is the highest-ever for four-year player at UNLV and she left third in all-time singles victories and second in all-time doubles wins at the school.
Gantcheva won UNLV's first-ever singles crown at an ITA event when she left as co-champ of the West Region (California wildfires forced the cancellation of the final match) after she improved her career ITA Regional singles record to a stunning 14-2.
The UNLV Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year awards were voted on by head coaches, administrators and sports information personnel at UNLV.
