The Sewanee athletic department will have a notable difference after 36 years. Nancy Ladd no longer will be around as a coach or athletic administrator. She announced her retirement Monday, effective at the end of the 2015 Advent semester. She has coached volleyball, basketball, field hockey, slowpitch and fastpitch softball and golf at Sewanee and served also as an assistant athletic director and senior woman administrator. "Nancy is retiring with the longest tenure of any current coach or administrator," athletic director Mark Webb said in a school release. "She has coached hundreds of student-athletes in numerous sports, and as an administrator she has been instrumental in the development of our successful women's athletics program." Ladd retires with the most volleyball wins in school history and second-most women's basketball victories, and she has coached five athletes who have been selected for the Sewanee Athletics Hall of Fame: three basketball players, a golfer and a volleyball player. Three of her athletes have been NCAA Division III All-Americans, and golfer Emily Javadi from Chattanooga was the WGCA Division III freshman of the year with Ladd as her coach in 2012. Ladd is a 1975 graduate of Tennessee, where she lettered in basketball under legendary coach Pat Summitt, and began working at Sewanee in 1979. She's had two children graduate from Sewanee.
Chattanooga Football Club's Sias Reyneke and Atlanta Silverbacks' Ferrety Sousa chase the ball Wednesday at Finley Stadium.Lacrosse
* Just eight years after graduating from Girls Preparatory School, Chattanooga native Ashley Johnson has been named the women's lacrosse head coach at Alma College, an NCAA Division III school in Michigan. Johnson has been a graduate assistant since 2012 at Division II member Grand Valley State in Grand Rapids, Mich., and also worked with the Rapid Lax Club program there. Before that she was an assistant at D-II member Georgian Court in New Jersey. She played collegiately at Birmingham-Southern, where she was a four-year team captain and became a USA College Lacrosse Division III All-American as a senior after leading the league in assists. She was a high school All-American and two-time captain at GPS. Alma went 5-11 this past year, 4-4 in its conference. "I am really excited about getting to campus and starting the recruiting process," Johnson said in an Alma release. "Working at Grand Valley State for the past three years, I really fell in love with the state of Michigan, so I was overjoyed when this opportunity presented itself. I played Division III lacrosse, and I felt a lot of similarities between where I played and Alma in terms of each school's mission and dedication to the success of student-athletes."
Soccer
* The Chattanooga Football Club will host two matches this weekend as part of the National Premier Soccer League Southeast Conference playoffs. How it does in the first one will determine if it plays in the second. Chattanooga FC (12-2-1, 8-1-1), the top seed in the conference, will host Nashville FC at Finley Stadium at 7:30 p.m. Friday. The other semifinal has the Georgia Revolution playing the Atlanta Silverbacks Reserves at Silverbacks Park at 7. Friday's winners will meet Saturday at 7:30 at Finley, and that will winner will advance to the South Region playoffs, which consists of champions also from the Sunshine, South Central and South Atlantic conferences.
Softball
* Another United States women's team won a World Cup this past weekend - in softball - and former University of Tennessee standouts Raven Chavanne and Lauren Gibson were part of the gold-medal success for the second year in a row. The U.S. national team has won the World Cup of Softball eight of its 10 years of existence, Japan winning the other two but falling 6-1 in this year's final Sunday in Irvine, Calif. Chavanna was 1-for-2 in that game and led the U.S. with 10 hits in six games and a .625 average. Gibson had an RBI single and scored a run Sunday, winding up at .364 with three RBIs and five runs in the tournament. The U.S. junior national team including UT's Meghan Gregg finished fifth.