Lady Tigers take NCAA title
The LSU's women's track and field team celebrates after winning the NCAA Outdoor Championships in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday.
LSU women win 26th; men finish in second
DES MOINES, Iowa — At the end of the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships on an unusually-hot midwestern Saturday, LSU coach Dennis Shaver was showered with a bucket of ice and cold water by members of his women’s team.
“I love those kinds of baths,” a smiling Shaver said as he toweled off.
The only thing that could’ve topped that would have been two ice-water baths symbolic of two national titles — which the Tigers and Lady Tigers came close to doing at Drake Stadium.
As it was, the LSU women claimed the program’s 15th NCAA outdoor championship — and a record 26th overall title — when the top-ranked Lady Tigers closed the four-day meet with a flourish.
After scoring 40 points in only four events on Friday night, they returned Saturday morning to finish the job. With five scoring opportunities, they capitalized again with two wins and added 36 points to their total to take their first NCAA title since 2008.
LSU outscored third-ranked Oregon, 76-62, to secure the title, while three-time defending champion Texas A&M was a distant third with 38 points.
Meanwhile, the second-ranked Tigers quietly made a strong run at the men’s title before coming up a little more than a half-second short of their first outdoor title since 2002.
Florida, which trailed LSU by two points going into the meet’s final event, won the 4x400-meter relay while the Tigers, who needed to beat the Gators or finish no worse than one spot behind them, came in third.
It gave three-time NCAA indoor champion Florida 50 points, while LSU finished second with 48. Texas A&M, which had won three consecutive national outdoor titles like its women’s team, settled for third with 40 points.
While it would have been nice to sweep the titles, which LSU did back in 1989 and ’90, Shaver wasn’t totally disappointed in the outcome.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “I couldn’t be more proud of how our athletes represented us — both the men and women.
“I think the men had an exceptional meet all the way through,” Shaver added. “We scored a lot more points than we were projected to score.”
The Lady Tigers, however, went into the meet as one of the favorites and they showed why — especially in running finals Friday and Saturday.
After going into the final day tied with Oregon, LSU took control with a victory in the 4x100 relay as Takeia Pinckney, Semoy Hackett, Rebecca Alexander and Kimberlyn Duncan clocked a time of 42.75 seconds.
It was the second straight win in the event and 14th in 31 NCAA meets for the Lady Tigers, who held off Texas A&M (42.82) with Oregon finishing fourth (43.58).
“We’ve had trouble with our exchanges all season between Semoy and me,” said Alexander, a former Belaire High School standout. “But we knew we had to get in down in practice, and we did it when it counted.”
Oregon took a one-point lead on a third-place finish by Jordan Hasay in the 1,500 meters, but LSU all but clinched the title in the next two events — the 200 meters and 100-meter hurdles — as it racked up 18 points in events the Ducks weren’t qualified in.
Duncan and Hackett, who were 2-3 in the 100 meters final Friday night, scored 14 big points when they raced to a 1-5 finish in the 200 with times of 22.86 and 23.31 seconds, respectively.
Duncan made NCAA history in becoming the first woman to win the national title in the 200 at the indoor and outdoor meets in back-to-back years.
Then, Jasmin Stowers chipped in four points with a fifth-place effort in the 100 hurdles at 13.20 seconds.
A few minutes later, when Oregon scored just one point in the 5,000 meters, LSU clinched.
The Ducks won the 4x400 relay in a meet-record time of 3 minutes, 24.54 seconds, with the Lady Tigers taking second with a school record 3:24.59.
But LSU won the title that counted most.
“We just came out and worked as hard as we could,” said Duncan, a junior whose two titles gave her six for her career. “We knew coming here that we had to take each event and each day as it came.
“I told the girls if we just tried to make it to the finals in each event, the rest would come. I feel like everything went as planned.”
“That was a dominating performance by our women,” Shaver said. “They all stepped up and weren’t going to be denied.”
On the men’s side, the Tigers made it a race even though they started the day in fourth place with 23 points.
The 4x100 relay team of Barrett Nugent, Aaron Ernest, Keyth Talley and Shermund Allsop got the baton around in 38.38 seconds — the third-fastest time in school history — to get things started.
The win gave LSU a top-four finish in the meet for the fifth straight year, even though their best time coming into the meet was 38.49. They also had trouble getting the baton around safely, dropping it in two meets and being disqualified at the Southeastern Conference Championships.
“Coach Bennie (Brazell) was telling us when he ran (for LSU) they had some struggles on the relay, too, so it was about coming together as a unit and getting 10 huge points for the team race,” Talley said. “We just wanted to make sure we hit our exchanges right and make smooth passes all around.
“We didn’t want to go out there and be uptight, so it was about having fun and just cutting loose.”
Ernest then ran fifth in the 200 in 21.00 seconds and Nugent finished fourth in the 110-meter hurdles with a time of 13.80 seconds, while Florida’s Eddie Lovett was fifth.
That put LSU up by four points over Florida with only the 4x400 relay left.
LSU’s team of Robert Simmons, Quincy Downing, Ade Alleyne-Forte and Riker Hylton produced a time of 3:01.21 to finish third.
But Florida, with Tony McQuay running the anchor, won with a 3:00.02 to clinch the team title. McQuay is the reigning USA national champion at 400 meters.
Hylton, who got the baton in third place, desperately tried to make up a 10-meter deficit. He pulled into second and closed the gap to about 5 meters with 200 meters left, but could get no closer as Southern Cal ran 3:00.64 for second.
“It’s tough to catch a guy like that,” Hylton said of McQuay. “He has a lot of speed, so all I wanted to do was be close to him. Unfortunately, he was a little too far out front.”
“Florida was just a little better,” Shaver said. “But still, we can’t be disappointed.”