CHS Senior Profile: Star Pitcher Ready for What Comes Next

John Bednarek has had one of the best months of his young life.

The Cinnaminson High School senior pitcher led the baseball team to its first Group 2 sectional title since the ‘70s, striking out 11 batters and allowing only one hit. Then, he persevered through a bases-loaded, no-outs sixth inning against Mahwah on the way to helping his team win its first-ever state championship.

Now, he’s getting ready to play a much bigger game. Bednarek, 17, will attend St. Thomas Aquinas College in New York this fall, where he’ll continue to play baseball for the Spartans.

Bednarek’s propensity for baseball took hold early on, when he was about 5 or 6.

“I really enjoy all the little things about the sport,” he said. “The stuff that most people don’t see.”

It’s probably why Bednarek plans on majoring in actuarial science at St. Thomas Aquinas—all those numbers and statistics are pretty appealing to a baseball geek, he admitted.

And while he’d prefer to keep analyzing numbers within the context of his sport—RBIs, ERAs, so on and so forth—Bednarek is pragmatic about his future, hence the actuarial science degree.

“I’d probably like to see how far I can go with baseball, but things can happen,” he said, “and I need to have a fallback plan.”

Though he’s still coming down off the high of his team’s historic championship victory—“I’m just starting to realize how big of a deal it is”—Bednarek seems equally excited about taking his first steps into the world beyond high school.

“I’m looking forward to the new experience,” he said.

This is the second in a series of profiles of Cinnaminson High School seniors running all this week, leading up to graduation on Thursday, June 20. The commencement ceremony will begin at 5:45 p.m.