-Tim Clark, TLU Sports Information
(Seguin) – In an announcement made last week from Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference headquarters, Texas Lutheran University’s Chassety Raines was named the 2021 SCAC Softball Elite 19 award winner.
Established prior to the 2018-19 academic year and meant to recognize the best of the best within each of the league’s 19 sponsored sports as it relates to both academic and athletic achievement, the SCAC Elite 19 is awarded to the student-athlete who has completed the equivalent of at least 60 credit hours at his or her current institution and has at least a cumulative 3.25 GPA. The student-athlete must also have earned All-SCAC First, Second or Third Team honors in his/her sport for that particular season.
Raines, a redshirt sophomore utility player, currently holds a cumulative GPA of 4.00 as a double major in Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Environmental Biology. She was named First Team All-SCAC last week after helping lead TLU to its seventh-straight SCAC Softball title.
Raines is the second-straight TLU Bulldog to earn the SCAC Softball Elite 19 award. DeAnna Hernandez was honored in 2020. Hernandez was the NCAA Division III Elite 90 award winner for softball at the 2019 NCAA DIII National Championship Finals, and she was an NCAA Woman of the Year finalist.
Raines, the Most Outstanding Player of the 2019 NCAA DIII Championship Finals, is TLU’s Junior-Year Female Student-Athlete of the Year. She was an Academic All-American in 2020.
As the team’s starting third baseman, she is hitting .366 with 26 RBI, four doubles, two triples, and a home run. She has walked 13 times and stolen 21 bases.
Raines also is one of the team’s top pitchers, and she has played in the outfield too. She is 6-0 this year with an ERA of 2.15. In her three-year Bulldog career, she is 18-0 with an ERA of 1.32. Raines has an extra year of athletic eligibility, should she choose to use it, due to the pandemic. She is classified as a sophomore athletically and a junior academically.