CHARLESTON, S.C. - College of Charleston redshirt-junior third baseman Matt Leeds (Boca Raton, Fla.) has been named to the 2011 Capital One Academic All-America First Team as selected by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA).
Leeds is a recent summa cum laude graduate with a bachelor's degree in accounting with minors in economics and finance from the CofC School of Business. He becomes only the fifth baseball student-athlete in program history and first since 2006 to be honored as an Academic All-American joining Joey Foxhall, Brett Anderson, Phillip Coker and Travis Howell.
The 2010 Southern Conference Player of the Year earned an impressive 3.93 grade-point average, the highest cumulative GPA among all CofC student-athletes this past school year. On the field, he is currently batting .347 on the season with 18 home runs and a team-high 75 RBIs, good for fourth in the country. Last year, Leeds was second in the nation in RBI with a school single-season record 88 and helped lead the Cougars to the NCAA Myrtle Beach Regional. He was also tabbed an ABCA/Rawlings Third Team All-American and completed a successful internship with a hedge fund on Wall Street in the summer of 2010.
To be nominated for the team, a student-athlete must have a 3.3 or better cumulative GPA and be in their second year of competition and academically at a school. Since the program's inception in 1952, CoSIDA has bestowed Academic All-America honors on more than 14,000 student-athletes in Divisions I, II, III and NAIA, covering all NCAA championship sports. For more information about the Academic All-America® Teams program, please visit: www.cosida.com.
CofC advanced to the 2011 SoCon Baseball Tournament as the No. 5 seed and will face No. 4 Georgia Southern on Wednesday, May 25 at 9 p.m. (ET). The game will be broadcast on ESPN Radio 910-AM with Jeff McCarragher on the play-by-play. Live stats can be found on www.CofCSports.com http://www.cofcsports.com/ and twitter updates are available by following at www.twitter.com/cofcsports http://www.twitter.com/cofcsports.