By Bridget Letukas
Phillylacrosse.com, Posted 3/6/11
For Lehigh co-captain Jonathan Stumpf and his Mountain Hawk teammates, a season of great promise has begun with early success.
Fresh off a14-10 victory over Navy – the first by Lehigh of the Academy since 1913 – Stumpf and Co. are now 2-1 and confident they can contend in the Patriot League after a strong finish last year.
But searching for a playoff birth isn’t the only goal for Stumpf this year. He and his teammates continue to reach out to the community around them.
Led by Stumpf – who recently was named a candidate for the prestigious Lowe’s Senior CLASS Award for academics and service – the Mountain Hawks have participated in a variety of service projects.
For his academic and service excellence, as well as leadership on the field, Stumpf was named the Phillylacrosse.com Collegiate Scholar-Athlete of the Week.
Stumpf has a 3.88 GPA in Lehigh’s challenging Integrative Business and Engineering Honors Program and was named to the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll. He also was selected to receive the Faculty Athletics Council Academic Award,
From visiting elementary schools and the local Boys & Girls Club to holding free lacrosse clinics to cleaning up areas around the university, Stumpf has consistently joined his teammates in taking their time and talents off the lacrosse field and into the community.
Crediting his parents for motivating him to get involved in helping others, Stumpf said that the experiences have not so much formed a team, but a brotherhood.
“This is definitely the closest team I’ve ever been a part of,” he said, noting that the leadership of co-captains Richard Bradley and Will Scudder have been integral. “It feels great. We have each other’s backs.”
Fitting then that Lehigh’s band of brothers has also managed to take part in Adopt-A-Family, in which the men pulled their money together to buy Christmas gifts for a needy family.
With a schedule consisting of Bucknell, Colgate, North Carolina, and perennial rival Lafayette, Stumpf hopes his team will continue to pull together and prevail in this season’s upcoming battles.
Whatever the outcomes, Stumpf, who heads to Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab this summer for an internship, is savoring his final season as a Mountain Hawk.
“This is a special team that I am going to miss,” he said.
Last week’s honoree: Villanova’s Rachel Lasda
No nominate a student-athlete for the Scholar-Athlete of the week, e-mail us at golax@phillylacrosse.com
