The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Monica San Juan shared the individual lead and the Mocs were in third place at 301 after the first round Sunday of the 2019 Southern Conference women’s golf tournament at Hilton Head, South Carolina. Furman, which has won the last three years, shot a 296 and Mercer had a 298 on Moss Creek Golf Club’s south course, and East Tennessee State was two shots behind UTC. San Juan matched Furman’s Haylee Harford and ETSU’s Hee Ying Loy at 1-under-par 71, and the Mocs’ Rheagan Hall and Esme Hamilton shot 75 and 76, tying for ninth and 13th. The UTC men, whose SoCon tournament is next week at Pinehurst, North Carolina, are set to play 54 holes today and Tuesday in the Old Waverly Collegiate at West Point, Mississippi.
Tennis
» UTC is seeded third in the SoCon men’s tennis tournament and eighth in the women’s. Both are scheduled to run Thursday through Saturday at the John Drew center in Macon, Georgia. The female Mocs (8-11, 1-6) open at 8:30 a.m. Thursday against top seed Furman, which beat them 7-0 on April 7. The UTC men (14-10, 4-3), with the program’s best record since 2012, plays sixth-seeded host Mercer at 3 p.m. The Bears won their regular-season matchup 4-3. Both UTC teams had 4-3 results Saturday, the women in a loss to Samford with senior Annie Tarwater injuring a wrist during doubles and having to forfeit in singles and the men with a dramatic victory at UNC Greensboro when Niklas Gerdes prevailed 3-6, 7-6 (7-5), 6-4 at No. 1 singles. The UTC men won all three doubles clashes for the first team point, and Simon Bustamante and Kerim Hyatt preceded Gerdes with singles wins. UTC’s women also won the doubles point and got singles triumphs from Bogdana Zaporozhets and Emma Van Hee.
» The Sewanee tennis teams both polished off their seventh consecutive Southern Athletic Association regular-season championships with 9-0 wins Sunday at Birmingham-Southern. Each set of Tigers went 6-0 in league play. The Sewanee men are 17-5 overall and ranked 19th in NCAA Division III, and they host Emory this afternoon. The Sewanee women are 14-8 and ranked 28th. The SAA tournaments run April 26-28 in Murfreesboro.
Baseball