LSU gymnastics coach D-D Breaux pushed her team to its limit in 2013 — a 1,830-mile limit, to be exact.
The No. 5 Tiger gymnastics team’s season ended on the sport’s biggest stage at the collegiate level when it traveled to Los Angeles for the Division I National Championships.
LSU scored its seventh-highest point total of the season at the UCLA Pauley Pavilion with a 197.050, which was good enough for a fifth-place finish in the Super Six competition.
“Although we didn’t have any mistakes tonight, we didn’t compete with the same confidence,” Breaux said in a radio interview after the Super Six competition. “[Friday] night, it was all about that ‘reckless abandon’ feeling. … We got here, and I think these kids were ready to compete well, and they gave it all they had.”
The Tigers reached a bit of a hot streak toward the end of the season with four out of their final five competitions breaking the 197-point mark.
LSU topped out on the scoreboard in the Southeastern Conference championships with a 197.700, which put it at a third-place finish behind then-defending national champions Alabama and eventual 2013 national champions Florida.
Despite LSU’s inability to clinch its first-ever national title, sophomore Rheagan Courville vaulted her way to the team’s first individual title in four seasons.
Courville was the backbone of the Tiger squad, producing All-American honors in vault and floor as well as the all-around competition in which she finished the regular season as the No. 7 gymnast in the country.
“It’s such an honor to join such successful athletes from LSU,” Courville said in a news release after the national championship meet. “It’s all about pride in your school, and I am so excited that half our vaulting lineup was in vault finals. It says so much about our team and coaches.”
Courville scored the team’s fourth perfect score of the 2013 campaign at the SEC championships when she posted the elusive 10.0 on the vault.
Junior Sarie Morrison and sophomore Lloimincia Hall were the other two gymnasts to score perfectly during the season.
Morrison’s top score came in the vault competition against Arkansas, while Hall is the only 2013 Tiger to accomplish the feat twice when her crowd-favorite floor routine earned her the 10.0 against Missouri and in the regular season finale against Alabama.
Morrison may have made more of an impact this season if it weren’t for her history of injuries plaguing the gymnast throughout the season. The Dallas native made a comeback in 2013 from a sophomore season hampered by nagging ankle injuries.
“Everyone kept telling me, ‘You’re never going to be able to vault or do floor again because you’ve had so many ankle injuries,’” Morrison said in a January interview. “I thought ‘No, I’m going to prove them wrong, and I’m going to come back and do the events that I love to do or I wouldn’t have gone through all that to begin with.’”
Breaux held Morrison out of away meet vault competitions for the majority of the season, but still allowed her to compete in her best event — the uneven bars — where she finished the season as the No. 8 gymnast in the nation.
