Hopedale’s Brayden Lewis recently completed his first year playing collegiate baseball with Wheaton College, where he was named the Conference Rookie of the Year. The former Blue Raider is taking that performance and making the move up the chain: he will be taking his talents to Northeastern University next fall. 

“I’ve been playing baseball my entire life and like so many young players I too hope to play professional baseball someday,” Lewis said. “Being from a small school like Hopedale, a lot of athletes never get that opportunity to play college sports, never mind making it professionally, but if I keep an open mind and continue working, it may be a possibility.”

The Hopedale shortstop was moved from the infield to the outfield upon arriving at Wheaton, but it wasn’t a surprise.

“I knew it was coming and things like this can be hard to adapt to, but I learned the position quickly and was able to start right away for Wheaton,” he said. 

Prior to leaving for his first year of college, Milford Legion Coach Steve DiVitto got Lewis to come out for the summer team. Playing for Milford gave him the ability to make the jump from high school to college without missing a beat. 

According to Lewis, college is the best players from each high school, and he needed to be able to adapt while taking his game to the next level. He put in a lot of extra work so he would be successful against the pitchers, who are not only better than those he saw on the high school level, but throw much harder. 

“Being able to go from Wheaton to Northeastern shows he has what it takes,” DiVitto said. “He is one of the best to come through this program. He loves the sport and it shows; his power of his bat is unbelievable, and he has speed to make things happen. He is also a great fielder with an arm.”

Lewis concluded his Hopedale career hitting .420, while batting .540 in his junior season and .480 as a senior; he also had a total of three home runs. During his first college season with the Lyons, Lewis batted .326 with 10 homeruns, added 8 doubles, 2 triples, while scoring 29 runs and had 36 RBI. He says it was all due to his getting stronger and focusing solely on baseball. With the success in his first year, he thought it may be the right time to move ahead and entered the transfer portal.

“After my success, I decided to transfer out of Wheaton. I’ve always wanted to play Divisional 1 baseball at the highest level,” he said. “I figured the time was right, entered the portal and coaches started reaching out. When I heard from Northeastern, I set up a visit, fell in love with the school, and found out they had two outfielders graduating leaving an opportunity to possibly play right away.”

Lewis is hoping he can earn a starting position in the outfield for the Huskies and help them to their third straight Conference championship. In order to do so, he is going to work extremely hard this summer with the Milford Legion team.

“I wanted to come back to Milford for a second year to help me prepare as well as get me the exposure,” Lewis said. “I also want revenge on last year’s disappointment.”

Last summer, Milford ran the table in Zone 4 going 20-0 while earning the number one seed in the tournament. Unfortunately, they were upset in the first round, and their season quickly came to an unexpected end.

Milford is returning a lot of talent from last year’s squad and, although Lewis doesn’t expect to go undefeated, he does want to help this team back into the Zone 4 Tournament and make a deep run showing everyone that last year was not a fluke. 

Lewis’s ultimate goal is to continue to play for Northeastern as well as he did at Wheaton, and eventually get drafted into the big leagues.