UCSB’s Danae Miller was picked for an NCAA Engagement Group.
Kayla Day will get a good workout at her old stomping grounds today, playing for both the singles and doubles championships at the $25,000 Central Coast Home Health and Hospice Women’s Pro Invitational.
Day, who swept Irvine’s Anne Lutkemeyer 6-1, 6-1 in Thursday’s semifinals, will face UCSB recruit Camille Kiss in today’s 11 a.m. singles final at the Santa Barbara Tennis Club.
Kiss, an incoming Gaucho freshman from Redlands, upset WTA pro Sophia Whittle 6-1, 6-3 in Thursday’s other singles semifinal.
Day also advanced to today’s 1 p.m. doubles final with Whittle after beating UCSB’s Marta Baalbe and Kira Reuter 7-6, 6-1 in Thursday’s semifinals. They will play WTA pros Lorraine Guillermo and Shatoo Mohamad, who beat Kiss and Gaucho teammate Lise Sentenac 6-4, 6-0 in the other semifinal.
Former Gaucho gets HOF nod
Lin Loring, who both played and coached tennis at UCSB, has been selected for induction into the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Women’s Tennis Hall of Fame.
Loring retired from Indiana University in 2017 with an NCAA Division 1 record 846 victories in 44 seasons. He earned 42 of those wins at UCSB and 804 more after arriving at Indiana in 1977.
“This award is special because it comes from your peers, the people you coached against for so many years,” Loring said. “It is really a tribute to all the wonderful young ladies I coached over the years.”
He won 16 Big Ten championships and 28 national tournament appearances. He also won the 1982 AIAW National Championship, the precursor to the NCAA Championship.
He was twice named National Coach of the Year and also earned Big Ten Coach of the Year honors five times.
Loring, who graduated from UCSB in 1972, follows his former Gaucho teammate, Greg Patton, into the ITA Hall of Fame.
Patton earned induction last year after retiring as the men’s coach at Boise State with 808 wins — most of any active coach at the time and the fourth-most in NCAA history. He coached for 37 seasons with stints at UCSB, Cal State Bakersfield, UC Irvine and Boise State.
The 2021 Women’s Hall of Fame class will be inducted in a ceremony on Sept. 18 of next year. Joining Loring in induction will be Diane Donnelly Stone, AnnaMaria Fernandez-Ruffels and Lisa Spain Short. The ceremony will also honor the life of Millie West, the former chair and curator of the Hall of Fame.
UCSB’s Miller picked by NCAA
Danae Miller, a senior point guard on the UCSB women’s basketball team, has been selected to the newly formed NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Student-Athlete Engagement Group.
An NCAA release describes the group as an amplifying voice for women’s basketball on key initiatives, legislation and various issues. It was formed in collaboration with the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association and will have a direct connection to the NCAA Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.
The group consists of current NCAA Division I women’s basketball student-athletes from all 32 conferences.
Miller is a two-time All-Big West Conference selection, earning second-team honors as a sophomore and honorable mention last year. She played the most league minutes of any Big West student-athlete last year. Her 72 assists were the second-most in conference and she was also 10th in scoring average at 13.3 points per game.
Her last-second basket at Hawaii on March 4 earned UCSB the No. 2 seed for the Big West Tournament — an event that was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
email: mpatton@newspress.com
