Women's Basketball | 3/7/2019 10:59:00 AM

FAIRFAX, Va. – Nicole Cardaño-Hillary proved she wasn't just a freshman phenom.

On Thursday, the George Mason sophomore was named the 2019 Atlantic 10 Player of the Year, the league announced in a vote of coaches. Cardaño-Hillary, the 2018 A-10 Rookie of the Year, leads the league in scoring (20.4 ppg) and steals (65) and also was named to the A-10 All-Conference First Team. In addition, junior guard Sarah Kaminski was tabbed to the A-10 All-Academic Team.

This marks the second straight year a Patriot has been named the A-10 Player of the Year as former graduate student Natalie Butler took the top honor last year. Cardaño-Hillary is the first player in A-10 history to win A-10 Rookie of the Year and A-10 Player of the Year honors in back-to-back years. She is just one of eight to win both awards during her career. She is only the fifth sophomore to be named A-10 Player of the Year and first since Saint Louis guard Jackie Kemph shared the honor in 2015-16.

Mason is also just the third school to have different players win the award in consecutive years: Temple (Candice Dupree, 2005-06, and Kamesha Hairston, 2006-07), Xavier (Ta'shia Phillips, 2008-09, and Amber Harris, 2009-10) and George Mason (Natalie Butler, 2017-18, and Nicole Cardaño-Hillary, 2018-19). 

Cardano-Hillary, a 5-foot-7 point guard from Madrid, Spain, picked up where she left off as a freshman in 2017-18 in which she ranked third in the conference in scoring (17.8 ppg) and first in steals (84). 

This season, she is tied for 16th in the country in scoring (20.4 ppg) and scored more than 20 points in 16 games. She also notched 30 points or more four times, including a career-high 37 against George Washington on Feb. 6. The 37 points were the most by a Mason player in a game in more than 15 years. In addition to leading the league in steals for the second straight year, she also is tied for fifth in assists (95).

She currently ranks 14th on Mason's all-time scoring with 1,218 points and is 13th in career steals (149).

Kaminski, a junior from Plymouth, Minn., was named to the A-10 All-Academic Team for the first time in her career. The criminology major boasts a 4.0 GPA, is a two-time George Mason Provost Scholar Athlete and was named to the Google Cloud Academic All-District Team last week. This season, she ranked fourth on the team in scoring (7.7 ppg) and led the team in 3-pointers made (56). She ranks sixth in program history with 139 3-pointers made. This is the second straight year Mason has had a player on the All-Academic Team as Butler also earned the honor last year.

The Patriots' season ended on Tuesday with a 86-80 double overtime loss to Massachusetts in the first round of the Atlantic 10 Women's Basketball Championship. Mason finished with a 16-14 record and a 8-8 mark in league play. The Patriots posted back-to-back winning seasons for the first time in 15 years. The 40 wins over the last two years are also their most in a two-year stretch in program history.