Clark gets win 100 with UTC tennis

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women's tennis team improved to 5-0 for the season and gave coach Jeff Clark his 100th win with the Lady Mocs with a 7-0 victory Friday evening against Austin Peay at the Racquet Club in Hixson. It was the fourth 7-0 win in a row for the 5-0 team. Clark is 100-84 in two stints with UTC. The former McCallie School and Vanderbilt player was 43-27 from 1999 to 2001 and is in the sixth year of his return to the program. "Chattanooga has such a tremendous tennis community, and it is an amazing place to coach," Clark said in a UTC release. "Getting to 100 wins is great, but it is really about the student-athletes. ... We have a bunch of good ones this year, and hopefully we can keep it going." The UTC men's team dropped to 4-2 with a 4-3 loss to Austin Peay at Baylor School.

Baseball

• Covenant College begins the seventh varsity season of its revived baseball program under former major leaguer Doug Simons by hosting Berea College in a doubleheader starting at noon today. The Scots can get him his 100th win today. They lost some key players from a solid 24-20 season last year -- notably James Rollins and Jonathan Carter and pitchers Tyler Smith, Demarius Johnson and Andrew Glover -- but return seven of the nine batters from the regular lineup. This could be Simons' best lineup, he says, but the pitching staff is a big question with sophomores Alex Mitchell, Micah Mabe and Keith Rice the most experienced. Freshmen Garrett Kriston and Alhanon Miller are key new pitchers to go with position-player newcomers Braeden Lane, Stephen Wray, Patrick Sanderson and Perry Rigby, a freshman infielder who transferred from UAB. Sterling Witt, Scott Gillespie, David Lockwood, Will Cleland, K.C. Simons and Chris Rollins are the top everyday returners.

• Jeremy Brotherton will be back today at a baseball field where he spent a lot of time growing up. The son of former UTC and Chattanooga State coach Bob Brotherton is an assistant now at Georgia Perimeter, which plays a doubleheader at Chattanooga State beginning at 1 p.m. The younger Brotherton, now 30, played the 2002 season for the Tigers, between NCAA Division I schools Georgia and Kennesaw State. At both of those he was a roommate of Brett Campbell, the Georgia Perimeter head coach. Brotherton joined him this year after helping his dad at Dalton High for five years; Bob Brotherton now is an assistant principal at Whitfield Career Academy. "I started hanging around Chattanooga State when I was 5 or 6 years, and it's going to be fun going back and coaching on the field I grew up on, no doubt," Jeremy said Friday. "Growing up there allowed me to become the person I am today. Learning the game from my dad and around guys at such a high level allowed me to compete at the level I got to compete at." He noted that current Chatt State pitcher Colton Kinnamon played for the Brothertons at Dalton, and he is very familiar with the Ringgold players on the Tigers' roster. Georgia Perimeter won two 4-1 games at home against the Tigers last Saturday, "and we were fortunate. They left a lot of players on base," Jeremy said. "[Coach] Greg Dennis does a great job there. His kids play extremely hard for him, and they are very fundamentally sound. He's done an outstanding job recruiting and coaching there, and the facilities really have been upgraded. Their facilities are second to none."

• The Lee University baseball team improved to 6-0 for the season by defeating Bluefield 23-2 and beating Georgetown (Ky.) 6-1 in the Tennessee Valley Invitational on Friday. Rio Grande won 4-0 over Bluefield at Lee before falling 1-0 at Bryan, which earlier lost 5-3 to Madonna. L.J. Rowden pitched a one-hitter with six strikeouts and Josh Harris had the RBI for the Lions. Danny Canella was 3-for-3 with a home run, five RBIs and four runs scored against Bluefield for Lee, which got three RBIs apiece from Brandon Rader, Corey Davis, Jordan Stewart and Chris Avey and a combined 5-for-6 game with three runs each for Mark Silva and Brady Renner. Roberto Duran was 2-for-3 with two homers and four RBIs against Georgetown, when Myles Smith, Alex Moore and Andy Hillis pitched a combined four-hitter. Jamie Blackwell was 3-for-4 with a homer and two RBIs and Chris Rosa and Jacob Wright also homered for Bluefield against Lee.

Softball

• Former GPS star Tory Lewis went 2-for-3 with three runs batted in and one scored as the fifth-ranked Tennessee softball team won 10-0 on Ellen Renfroe's five-inning no-hitter in the Red Desert Classic at St. George, Utah. The Lady Vols (3-0) earlier beat Idaho State 14-2, also in five innings.

• Senior shortstop Laura Curtis from Chattanooga Christian and Chattanooga State had the first Memphis hit of the 2013 softball season, a double, and ended up 2-for-3 with an RBI in the Tigers' 6-2 loss to North Texas on Friday in the Texas Classic in Austin. Curtis had half of her team's hits. Then she was 2-for-4 with a double and two runs scored in a 7-5 win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

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