Racing at Boyd's Speedway normally has been on Saturdays this year, but the track returns to Friday action tonight with its sixth annual Sprint Car Mania program as part of the United Sprint Car Series "Outlaw Thunder" Tour. National championship points will be awarded as well as regional USCS Mid South and Southern Thunder points for the winged 700-horsepower, 1,300-pound open-wheel cars. Led by 10-time and defending USCS national champion Terry Gray from Bartlett, Tenn., and also including Aubrey Black from Lookout Mountain, drivers from at least six states are expected for the 30-lap featured event, and preliminaries will include a six-car Hoosier Speed Dash. There also will be a USCS 600 Sprint Series race with mini sprint cars, and the track will run its regular Crate Late Models and A and B Hobby classifications. Soddy-Daisy's Jerry Coffman won the Crate midseason championship at Boyd's last Saturday, when Soddy-Daisy's Robby Mason was the Steel-Headed Late Model winner, Booger Brooks and Eric Hughes were the Hobby victors and Koty Campbell won in FWD. Gates will open today at 5 p.m., and racing will start at 7.
Motocross
• Abigail Jacks of Rossville has qualified for the world's largest amateur motocross race, which starts next week at Loretta Lynn's Ranch at Hurricane Mills, Tenn. The 33rd annual Rocky Mountain ATV/MC AMA Amateur nationals run July 27-Aug. 2 at the place where most of the nation's top professional motocrossers first got significant attention. More than 20,000 amateurs in 36 classifications have spent the last five months qualifying in area and regional competition for the 1,446 spots in the national event. Jacks, 19, qualified in the Women 14-plus class in Pell City, Ala., in March and at Lazy River Motocross in Dalton, Ga., last month. She qualified for the nationals in the Girls 12-15 class in 2010.
Football
• The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga appears five times in the 14-game football viewing package released Thursday by the Southern Conference, including four on the newly formed American Sports Network of commercial television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. ASN has 167 stations in 77 markets, reaching nearly 40 percent of TV households in the United States, according to a UTC release. The Mocs already were set for ESPN3, which is available by Internet in about 75 million homes, for the Aug. 28 season opener at Central Michigan, and for the SEC Network for the Oct. 11 game at Tennessee. The five newly announced showings are Sept. 27 at home against Samford, Oct. 18 at The Citadel, Oct. 25 at home against Mercer and Nov. 22 at Furman on ASN and Nov. 8 at home against Wofford on ESPN3.
Track & Field
• Two more area track and field athletes signed recently with Tennessee Wesleyan College's burgeoning program: Cleveland High School's Kevin Ha as a weight thrower for the men's team and Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe's Bethany Swint as a sprinter for the Lady Bulldogs. "Bethany has a very positive outlook and is ready to succeed both on the track and in the classroom," TWC coach Shawn Jakubowski said in a web posting. "She will primarily be a 400 runner, but we will try putting her in other sprints as well. Bethany is a very athletic runner." Assistant coach Thomas Barker said of Ha that "Kevin is a talented thrower, and we definitely are excited to get him on board. He comes from a great high school program."