INDIANAPOLIS – One week after two of his teammates were honored as Horizon League Players of the Week, UIC junior Reid Birlingmair was formally recognized as the League's Pitcher of the Week, the conference office announced Monday, Feb. 26.
 
Birlingmair is the third different Flame to be saluted during the young season, joining Ryan Campbell and Scott Ota, last week's Pitcher and Player of the Week, respectively. It is the third time Birlingmair, an All-Horizon League performer in the field and in the classroom, has won the award after doing so twice in a three-week span in 2017.
 
The Normal, Ill., native set the tone for the three-game series at UTRGV with a tremendous outing on the mound Friday night. Birlingmair fired 7.0 shutout innings against a high-powered UTRGV offense, which received votes in last week's National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association (NCBWA) poll. He scattered only three hits in his second start of the season with the opposition batting only .125 against him in the game. Birmlingmair, a hard-throwing right-hander, struck out six as he picked up his first win of the season for the Flames and helped UIC move to 4-1 (at the time).
 
Birlingmair was brilliant, but far from the only bright spot on the mound at UTRGV. UIC's starting staff did not surrender an earned run in 19.2 innings of work over the course of the weekend. The trio, which includes also Campbell and Jacob Key, struck out 25 UTRGV batters and allowed only seven free passes with an opponent's batting average of .171. Both Campbell and Key finished with career highs in strikeouts with eight and 11, respectively. Key's career-high 11 punch-outs were the most in an outing for a UIC pitcher since Ryan Zink fanned 11 Cleveland State Vikings on May 1, 2004. Birlingmair was the last member of the Flames to strike out 10 opponents in a single game, when he did so on Feb. 19, 2017 vs. Prairie View A&M.
 
UIC will open Granderson Stadium for the first time in 2018 on Tuesday, Feb. 27, when the Roosevelt Lakers visit at 4:05 p.m. The Flames will be in Atlanta over the weekend for a three-game series at Georgia Tech before returning to Chicago to begin a season-long 14-game homestand on March 6 against Northwestern.