Dalton State freshman SM Lee is the NAIA Jack Nicklaus Award winner as the best men's golfer nationally for the 2016-17 season. Following Sean Elliott in 2015, Lee gives the Roadrunners two Nicklaus Award winners in the program's four-year history. LSU's Sam Burns won this year's Nicklaus Award in NCAA Division I, and West Florida's Chandler Blanchet in Division II and LaGrange's Logan Lanier in Division III combine with DSC's Lee to provide three Nicklaus winners from conferences that include Chattanooga-area teams. Tyler's Marco Maldonado is the honoree from the NJCAA. The five 2017 winners will play the Barbasol Shootout on Saturday at Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio - where Nicklaus learned golf as a boy - for an exemption into the PGA Tour's Barbasol Championship July 20-23 at Opelika, Ala., and Nicklaus will honor them at 10 a.m. Sunday during the final round of the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club. Lee, who won four tournaments in his first year of college and finished no worse than tied for sixth in 10 events, also won the Phil Mickelson Outstanding Freshman Award for the NAIA.
- Tia Teiniketo from Finland by way of Baylor School joins SM Lee as 2017 NAIA golf first-team All-Americans from Dalton State, and junior P.J. Shields from LaFayette, Ga., is a men's second-teamer with junior Caroline Griffin, sophomore Katie Dalton and freshman Isabel Rijos on the women's second team. Griffin is a three-time All-American now, and Dalton is another repeat honoree.
- In addition to Stephan Jaeger winning a recent Web.com Tour professional event in Greenville, S.C., and Jonathan Hodge finishing fifth there and subsequently winning the SunTrust Tennessee State Open in Gallatin, other former and current University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's golfers had good Mays. The Mocs' former U.S. Amateur winner, Steven Fox, was just three strokes back of Hodge in the State Open, where Wes Gosselin tied for eighth, Derek Rende was 10th and UTC rising junior Lake Johnson tied for 13th. Rende and Fox are previous State Open champions, and Fox is leading the Adams Pro Tour with two wins, another top-five finish, another top-10 and a 68.9 stroke average. He won the Southwest Louisiana Open in March and the Business First Bank Classic in early May. Dominic Jones, who will join the UTC program as a freshman in January, played in two Audi Finnish Tour pro events in May and tied for ninth in both.
Volleyball
- Cleveland High School rising senior Emma Flowers is making her first trip out of the United States to play volleyball with Bring It Promotions, LLC, in the European Global Challenge tournament July 11-15 in Pula, Croatia. It will include national select teams from the U.S. as well as junior and youth national teams from across Europe. The U-17 BIP SE All Star Team - from Texas, Florida, Kentucky, Georgia, Colorado and even Italy in addition to Flowers from Tennessee - will begin its tour and preparation in Munich, Germany, followed by Salzburg, Austria, and Bled, Slovenia. Most of the group, all in the high school graduating class of 2018, have committed to NCAA Division I universities. One of the coaches is C.J. Sherman from Covenant College's class of 1987. "This particular organizaton has a really good reputation. College coaches have told me this should be a great trip," said Emma's mother, Patricia Flowers, Cleveland's coach and co-director of the C4 Explosive Volleyball club. "This is Emma's first time to play with her age since middle school - she's always played up - and it will be interesting to see how she does." Emma's under-18 C4 team was ranked fourth out of 75 clubs in the Southern Region this year and received a bid to the USA Volleyball nationals in Dallas. The team won the Nike 18 open division of the President's Day Classic in St. Louis.
Track & Field
- The Lee University men wound up eighth in the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association's Damon Martin Division II standings for program of the year for 2016-17, based on finishes in the national meets for cross country, indoor track and outdoor track. Three of the programs ahead of coach Caleb Morgan's Flames were from Colorado, led by award winner Adams State. Lee was the only school from the South in the standings. "Only 12 schools were able to qualify for all three national championships," Morgan said in a Lee release. "It is difficult to have a balanced roster of great distance runners and track athletes who can score at the national level. These standings prove that we have a great balance of both."