Capping off the elimination rounds at the top of the table and going on to win the championship of the UAAP 81 Baseball Tournament have been the high points of Lasallian sports this year. While the DLSU Baseball team has a multitude of players to boast about, right fielder Diego Lozano’s season was exceptional, as he bagged the Best Slugger, Most Home Runs, and Most Valuable Player awards at the conclusion of the season. Because of his colossal impact on and off the field for the Green Batters, Lozano has been chosen as The LaSallian’s Male Athlete of the Year.
With a team-first mentality, Lozano believes that his individual efforts were just a chip in order to bolster his team to collegiate baseball glory.
An illustrious career
A product of La Salle Green Hills (LSGH), Lozano has known baseball for most of his life picking it up as early as first grade. He shares that his father was the one who introduced him to the sport. “He used to be a varsity player back in LSGH. He would play baseball with his friends in LSGH every Saturday, just for fun, and I would always sit on the left field fence waiting for a ball to go to me. One day, he asked me to try and hit a baseball, and I hit and enjoyed it. The rest is history,” he recalls.
Primed to represent La Salle in the collegiate level, Lozano made an immediate impact in his first UAAP stint. In his rookie year, DLSU won the championship against ADMU, and he was awarded as co-Finals MVP alongside fellow LSGH alumnus Boo Barandiaran.
Lozano continued to rack up awards, as he was also awarded Best Right Fielder during the 80th edition of the UAAP. However, this never changed his philosophy of the importance of the team as a whole. “Every player in a team sport knows that individual awards mean nothing if they don’t become champions,” he expresses.
The same killer instinct
What made Lozano such a big part of his team’s collective success this season was his relentless attitude and his dedication to his team. “Our team talked about having that ‘killer instinct’ and I did—we all did. I approached every game as [if] it were my last and sacrificed a lot of things just so I can be at my best. Besides being relentless, just being myself and playing the game I love was a factor,” he adds.
“We lost a lot of players and are expecting a bunch of new ones too,” Lozano states. As a graduating player next season, Lozano agrees that he and the other seniors have a bigger role to play, especially with helping the younger players develop the winning mentality that has been inculcated in DLSU baseball culture. “It would be challenging because those things are not merely thought of. They have to see and realize how it is like, and we seniors will show them how to represent [our] school proudly,” he concludes.
No matter how good an individual athlete may be, Lozano proved that personal accolades come second to helping the whole team reach its ultimate goal: winning the championship.
