PRO BASEBALL
Per The Athletic’s Patrick Mooney, the Cubs have acquired former Old Dominion catcher P.J. Higgins for cash considerations in a trade with the Diamondbacks.
It’s a homecoming for Higgins, 30, a Connecticut native who was drafted by the Cubs in the 12th round in 2015. He made his big league debut for Chicago with nine games in 2021. Higgins made it into 74 games in 2022, hitting .229, catching and playing both infield corners.
He signed with Arizona in the offseason and hit well with Triple-A Reno, batting .317 with an .880 OPS. He’s likely going to go to Triple-A Iowa at first with the Cubs, sharing time with another former ODU player, Bryce Windham, and Dom Nunez.
HORSE RACING
‘Kingdom’ reigns at Colonial Downs
Determined Kingdom won Saturday’s Punch Line Stakes, the featured event of Colonial Downs’ first thoroughbred racing weekend this season, for the second year in a row.
Jockey Mychel Sanchez led the 4-year-old gelding to a 5-1/4 -length triumph, which followed last year’s 5-1/2 -length victory. The winner is trained by Phil Schoenthal.
Saturday’s fourth through seventh races, all featuring Virginia-bred horses on the grass course in New Kent County, had a combined purse of $500,000.
Thursday, the meet’s first day, featured a victory by Schoenthal-trained Determined Sail in a $75,000 Virginia-restricted maiden special weight race. D Hatman Thoroughbreds owns the winner, whose jockey was Antonio Gallardo.
TENNIS
Bertimons earn $5K for doubles title at Princess Anne
In a clash of brothers for likely the area’s most notable tennis title of the year, Max and Charles Bertimon rallied past Floridians Stefan and Boris Kozlov 2-6, 7-6, 6-4 Sunday afternoon for the Princess Anne Country Club Summer Open championship in Virginia Beach.
The Bertimons are Frenchmen who have played for VCU and who reached the 2022 NCAA doubles semifinals. They trailed 6-2, 5-4 before breaking serve to stay in contention against the Kozlovs; Stefan has been ranked as highly as 103rd in the world, and he defeated former world No. 3 Grigor Dimitrov in the Miami Open in February 2022.
After winning the tiebreaker, the Bertimons broke serve for a 2-1 third-set lead and held four times to take the $5,000 first-place check in a 16-team event that benefits An Achievable Dream, an educational initiative that helps children in localities such as Newport News and Virginia Beach. The Kozlovs can split $2,500.
Most of the tournament was held on outdoor clay, but play moved to indoor hard courts because of rain early in the semifinals.
Cox High graduate Barrett Foster, Hampden-Sydney’s No. 1 player, and Georgia Tech star Andres Martin won two matches together to reach the semifinals, worth $1,250. They fell 3-6, 6-2, 1-0 (10-2) to the Kozlovs while the Bertimons were defeating Virginia Tech’s Jordan Chrysostom and Wake Forest’s Matthew Thomson 6-4, 7-6 (8-6).
Before playing in his hometown event, Foster also reached the doubles semifinals of the Mid-Atlantic Clay Court Championships in Midlothian alongside 2017 NCAA singles winner Thai-Son Kwiatkowski, whom Martin defeated for the singles crown at that event at Salisbury Country Club. Martin will be a wild-card entry on July 24 in the ATP Atlanta Open, near where he grew up.
