Sarah Griffith from the Baylor Diving Club is a national champion. Griffith won the 1-meter competition in the 9-under girls' age group at the 2018 AAU National Diving Championships this past weekend in San Antonio, Texas, and she placed third on the 3-meter board. Another Baylor Diving Club member, Grace Hogue, competes Thursday in the 17-year-old girls' 1-meter category. John Bonds is the BDC coach, assisted by Kasha Jones.
Tennis
' The Chattanooga Lightning won the USTA Junior Team Tennis 18-under intermediate state championship this past weekend in Murfreesboro and will go to Rome, Georgia, for the Southern Sectional tournament Aug. 10-12. It's a repeat trip to the Southerns for the Lightning, who last year were state runners-up and advanced as a wild card. The Lightning include students from four area high schools: Mary Elizabeth Wakim, Jay Griggs, Andrew Thelen and Ryan Griggs from Signal Mountain; Rachel Hruby, Emma Campbell and Audrey Hill from Baylor; Bailey Dishmon and Henry Horne from Chattanooga Christian; and Brandon Newell from Rhea County.
Basketball
' Former Georgia Northwestern basketball player Kenisha "Scooby" Watkins of Lilburn, Georgia, is in the cast of the new movie "Uncle Drew" featuring NBA current and past stars such as Kyrie Irving, Shaquille O'Neal, Reggie Miller and Nate Robinson, plus women's star Lisa Leslie. Watkins, a charismatic 5-foot-3 sparkplug on the GNTC team that reached the round of 16 in its division of the 2012 NJCAA national tournament, is No. 13 on a women's team in the movie about a group of old guys playing for street-ball glory. "It wasn't part of the movie or anything, but I got to play some one-on-one with Kyrie on the set," Watkins, now 25, said in a GNTC release. "That was my favorite part of it all. And getting to meet and joke around with the legends at the shoot."
Volleyball
' The Lee University volleyball team compiled a 3.70 aggregate grade point average (on a 4.0 scale) for the 2017-18 school year in addition to a 20-10 record for the 2017 season and earned the American Volleyball Coaches Association team academic award. The honor requires a 3.30. Noting that the 3.7 is a program high for "recent years," coach Andrea Hudson said in a Lee release, "The girls truly work hard in the classroom, and to be rewarded as a team means a lot to the program."