Tennis Coach Claire Lyte was found guilty yesterday of conducting a lesbian affair with a nubile young minor. The court judge told her she faced an "inevitable" custodial sentence in a women's correctional facility. Claire responded, deadpan, "Oh, no. Please. Not the women's prison. Locked up with all those other women. Oh. Anything but that."

Former Wimbledon player Claire Lyte, 29, had sexual relations with the child between May 2005 and June 2006 while working as a coach at the Lawn Tennis Training Academy at Loughborough.

She shared a bed with the girl, wore her underwear and was caught engaging in oral sex by the child's mother.

Liverpool crown court heard the mother caught her daughter and the coach naked in bed together in October 2005. The jury was told that Lyte, who coached the girl for 10 months, had offered to babysit her.

Following a lengthy trial, in which normally apathetic, and mostly male, Jurors attended in record numbers, the Judge read the verdict yesterday and announced that sentencing would take place in November. Outside, the long queue of members of the public, again, mostly male - who have been vying for limited spaces on the public benches since the trial began - was hushed by a creepy murmur of excitement at the verdict.

It is rumoured that Claire Lyte has already cut a deal for the rights to her story with Larry Flynt, of Hustler magazine, who have been running a weekly, "Sun Newspaper" style photo-comic strip of lurid details of the case as they unfolded in the court.

Ms Lyte was last seen high fiving her lawyer at the back of the court.