When LSU competes in the 86th annual Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays this weekend in Austin, Texas, it will be a chance to return home for senior Kimberlyn Duncan and sophomore Rodney Brown.
Duncan will compete in the 100-meter dash, along with the relays, for the first time of the outdoor season. Duncan’s hometown of Katy, Texas, is two hours away from Austin, and she will be able to see her family for the meet.
“That’s the closest I’ll get to home until I’m actually able to go home,” Duncan said. “To be able to run in front of my home crowd, and it’s my last one I’m ready to hopefully come out with a few victories.”
Brown, who grew up in Chappell Hill, Texas, and finished the past two weekends with men’s discus titles, said competing in the Texas Relays was a dream in high school.
“It’s an honor to go, because all through high school I never got the chance to go, but to come to college and have the opportunity to compete is big, really big,” Brown said.
The Texas Relays will host 150 universities, the best high school athletes in Texas, and about 20,000 fans if the weather is nice, according to LSU coach Dennis Shaver.
“Texas Relays is probably one of the biggest events in Texas,” Duncan said. “I remember people on Twitter talking about it, people on Instagram posting pictures about it. It’s a big week. Everybody is ready to go. Everybody is hyped and excited.”
The meet isn’t as large as the Penn Relays held at Penn State or the Drake Relays in Iowa, but this meet serves as an early-season opportunity to test relays and run with good competition. The meet will have 60 teams in the relay preliminaries with only eight in the finals.
Shaver said the meet has more emphasis on relays and less on open-running events, but there is still a process to qualify for the meet and it is tough to qualify for field events.
“We enter everybody with their best performance, and we get notified if they’re in or not in,” Shaver said. “The majority of our athletes we planned to take were accepted, we had a few rejections, but that’s to be expected.”
Shaver said it’ll be a challenge to qualify for relay finals this year, but the team isn’t a stranger to success at the relays. Last year, Duncan was named the Most Outstanding Performer and the Lady Tigers made history at the meet, winning four relay championships. The Tigers finished with three event titles.
“We’ve had great success over the years, and we look for that to continue this weekend,” Shaver said.
Although this is her last time competing at the Texas Relays, Duncan said she tries not to think of all of her “lasts” this season. But when she does, it is bittersweet.
“Every now and then I’ll be like, “This is the last kind of meet like this,’” Duncan said. “It’s the last one, but at the same time I look at it like a positive. I have another opportunity to do great things.”
