Cairns repeats as Horizon League Scholar-Athlete of the Season

UIC softball alumna Taylor Cairns, who graduated in May with a degree in biological sciences, was named the Horizon League Female Scholar-Athlete of the Season for the spring.

The award, presented at the end of each of the three athletic seasons each year, is based on athletic and academic achievements and voted on by the league’s faculty athletic representatives. Cairns is a repeat winner of the award, as she was named the top student-athlete among all Horizon League softball, golf, tennis, and track and field teams last year, too.

Cairns was a leader for the Flames squad, which won the Horizon League regular season and tournament championships for the second straight season and advanced to the NCAA Lexington Regional. She started all 54 games this season, earning spots on the All-Horizon League First Team and the conference’s All-Tournament Team. She batted .315 with 51 hits, 29 runs scored, a 19-for-20 success rate in stealing bases, and was the conference leader in fewest strikeouts.

In addition to earning the Horizon League Post-Graduate Scholarship award and placing on the league’s All-Academic team for the second time, she earned CoSIDA Google Cloud Academic All-American honors this spring. These come in addition to her many awards and honors from UIC’s biological sciences department.

UIC’s third-leading base stealer of all time, Cairns sports a career fielding percentage of .949 at second base and a strikeout rate of just 9.3 percent. She will enroll in UIC’s College of Pharmacy this fall to begin work on her Doctor of Pharmacy degree.