April 30, 2013
By Matt Winkeljohn
Sting Daily
Those who know Brandon Thomas surely are not surprised that the Georgia Tech senior gives so much of himself in so many ways. He’s been at this for a while.
There are plenty of reasons he’s one of 10 baseball finalists from across the nation for the Senior CLASS Award for which fans vote here or here.
The honor is given annually to a student-athlete who is prolific in the community, in the classroom and in competition – all with high character.
“Brandon certainly has himself in a great position of not only being a great player . . . and then being a great student here at Georgia Tech, which is not easy, and also being involved in projects in the community,” said Yellow Jackets coach Danny Hall.
You might know of Thomas’ exploits on the baseball field, where last season he was named first team All-ACC after batting .360 with five home runs, 44 RBI and 44 stolen bases. The Pirates drafted him in the fourth round last June, but the Atlanta native opted to return to the Flats for a fourth year/season.
Fewer people are likely aware of the rest of Thomas, and there’s more of that than there is a baseball player, where he’s currently hitting .395 with a team-leading 13 doubles and 21 RBI despite missing nine games with mononucleosis.
He has a 3.5 grade point average in business administration, has made the Dean’s List six times at Tech, and was second team Academic All-America last year.
Earlier this semester, he led a trio of Yellow Jackets to St. Joseph’s Hospital Mercy Clinic on Decatur Street. There, he, Dusty Isaacs and Sam Dove assembled about 1,000 hygiene kits for folks. He’s done this kind of thing before, and said with the semester ending with this week’s finals he and several more teammates will soon return to Mercy.
“At Pace [Academy, where Thomas attended high school in Buckhead], we had a day of the year where the entire school would get dedicated to service projects across Atlanta so that’s kind of when I started thinking about it,” he said.
“Coming to Georgia Tech and realizing the platform that we have, I started thinking about it and we have a great opportunity to make differences that we don’t really realize. We can impact a lot of people.”
You can vote for Thomas at the Senior Class Award website here: http://www.seniorclassaward.com/ or at the Senior Class Award Facebook page here: https://apps.facebook.com/senior-class-award/.
