Vols No. 1 in NCAA baseball tourney
After finishing one of the most dominant runs in Southeastern Conference history, Tennessee was selected the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA baseball tournament Monday.
The Volunteers (53-7) won 31 of their first 32 games, swept the SEC regular-season and tournament titles and have the best pitching and batting statistics in the nation.
They’ve been the consensus No. 1 team in the polls all but one week since March 28 and enter regionals having won eight straight and 12 of 13.
The 64-team tournament opens Friday in 16 regionals. Winners advance to eight bestof-three super regionals. Those winners move on to the College World Series in Omaha.
The top eight national seeds are assured of hosting super regionals if they win their regionals.
The national seeds following Tennessee: Stanford (41-14), Oregon State (44-15), Virginia Tech (41-12), Texas A&M (37-18), Miami (39-18), Oklahoma State (39-20) and East Carolina (42-18).
Anthony DeMaio scored four first-half goals for his fifth hat trick in his last six games; Logan McNaney made 17 saves to be named the NCAA tournament’s most outstanding player; and top-seeded Maryland completed a perfect season by holding off Cornell 9-7 to win the men’s lacrosse title. The Terrapins (18-0) set an NCAA record for most wins in a season without a loss, becoming the first undefeated team since Virginia in 2006. The Terps are 33-1 in the last two seasons, with the lone loss coming in the 2021 championship against the Cavaliers.
Golf: Eun-Hee Ji won the LPGA MatchPlay on Sunday for a spot next week in the U.S. Women’s Open, beating Ayaka Furue 3 and 2 in cooler conditions at Shadow Creek in Las Vegas. Ji, the 2009 U.S. Women’s Open winner at Saucon Valley, took the last spot at Pine Needles with her sixth LPGA Tour victory and first since 2019. At 36, Ji is the oldest South Korean winner in LPGA Tour history. Ranked 83rd in the world, she was seeded 36th in the 64-player field. The temperature was in the high-80s Sunday after 100-degree heat the first three days and temperatures in the mid-90s Saturday. After a windy morning for the semifinals, it was somewhat calmer in the afternoon. Furue is winless on the LPGA Tour. Ranked 27th, the 22-year-old Japanese player was seeded 10th.
NFL: Cardinals DB Jeff Gladney died in a car crash Monday in Dallas. He was 25. The crash occurred on the service road of Woodall Rodgers Freeway in Dallas, KTVT-TV reported. Another person also died. The Dallas County sheriff ’s department said no one was available on the Memorial Day holiday to talk about the crash. Gladney played at TCU before becoming a 2020 first-round draft pick of the Vikings. He was released before the 2021 season, when he was charged with assaulting a woman. Gladney was found not guilty and was subsequently signed by the Cardinals.
Soccer: UEFA commissioned an independent inquiry into the events which led to the delayed kickoff at Saturday’s Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Paris, including supporters being sprayed with tear gas by riot police outside the Stade de France.