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W&J hires tennis coach

Washington & Jefferson College athletic director Scott McGuinness has announced the selection of Megan Foster as the Presidents’ new head coach of the men’s and women’s tennis programs.

“We are very excited to welcome Coach Foster to our campus community. She is a driven individual who is eager to start working with our tennis student-athletes,” said McGuinness. “We feel Coach Foster will strengthen the great foundation Chris Faulk has established with our tennis programs. The future is bright for Washington & Jefferson College tennis.”

Foster brings a wealth of experience to the position, as she has extensive experience with USTA committees and councils within the region since 2014. She has served as USTA Council Chair and USTA Council Vice President with the organizations. Her duties included establishing annual goals and objectives for the district and monitoring progress towards those goals.

Foster has served as a tennis teaching professional for the past three decades, which includes significant coaching experience at the high school level. Most recently she served as the head girls tennis coach at Mount Lebanon High School, where she was a 1990 graduate.

Atlantic 10 calls off fall sports

The Atlantic 10 Conference announced Friday the postponement of all scheduled fall contests in conference-sponsored sports and A-10 championships because of the continuing COVID-19 global pandemic. This includes men’s and women’s soccer, field hockey, men’s and women’s cross country and volleyball.

In baseball

Five more baseball players tested positive for COVID-19 in the past week, raising the total to 80 since testing started in late June.

Major League Baseball and the players’ association said six of 10,548 samples were new positives in the week ending Thursday, a rate of 0.05%. In addition to players, one staff member tested positive.

The sides do not announce names of those who test positive, but some players have allowed teams to identify themselves. Tampa Bay All-Star outfielder Austin Meadows was placed on the injured list Thursday night after testing positive for the coronavirus.

Edmonton’s CFL team to change nickname

The Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League reportedly will change their name. The team would not confirm the two reports.

TSN and Postmedia say the team will make a switch following this week’s decision to do the same by Washington’s NFL team.

Teams across sports have been under increasing pressure to drop racist or stereotypical names. Critics say the Edmonton team’s name is a derogatory, colonial-era term for Inuit.

In February, the club said it was keeping the name following yearlong research that involved Inuit leaders and community members across Canada. The club said it received “no consensus.”

It’s unclear when Edmonton would play its first game with a new name, if the change goes through. The CFL in June postponed the start of its 2020 season because of the pandemic, and there is no guarantee the league will play this year.

Highest-paid coaches avoid salary cuts

Most of the highest-paid college football coaches have avoided the voluntary salary reductions that have swept Power Five programs, according to an ESPN survey.

ESPN surveyed the 65 Power Five conference schools along with 10 other prominent basketball programs. At 33 of the 75 schools, at least one of either the football or basketball coach had agreed to have his pay cut to deal with the financial crisis brought on by the pandemic.

But eight of the 10 football coaches with the largest salaries during the 2019-20 academic year have not had their salaries reduced, including Clemson’s Dabo Swinney ($9.3 million) and Alabama’s Nick Saban ($8.9 million), the two highest-paid coaches in the the sport. Among basketball coaches half of the 10 highest paid have not taken cuts, including Kentucky’s John Calipari, the nation’s top paid coach.

Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, who made $7.5 million (tied for third highest with Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher), is the highest-paid football coach to take a pay cut, agreeing to a one-year, 10% reduction.

Among basketball coaches, Duke Mike Krzyzewski’s is the highest paid to agree to a cut. The longtime Blue Devils coach made $7.3 million last year and was part of a round of salary reductions at the school, where the highest-paid employees had their pay trimmed from 2.5% to 10%.

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