Hands pointed to the sky, Lloimincia Hall begins her floor routine amid palpable anticipation.
Moments later, her powerful tumbles and spontaneous dance moves send the PMAC into a frenzy.
Hall’s personality and energy makes her one of the LSU gymnastics team’s highest scorers and biggest crowd-pleasers. Hall’s floor routine against No. 3 Florida, which earned a near-perfect score of 9.95, provided the knockout blow in the final performance of the upset. She finished second overall in the meet with a score of 39.45 and is nationally ranked No. 10 all-around.
Behind her performances is one goal — showing her devotion to Christ. She closed her Florida floor performance by bringing her hands together in a prayer pose before transitioning to Tiger claws.
The Florida meet came just days after she traveled to Gary, Ind., to watch her grandfather be laid to rest after battling heart failure. She said she used his passing as motivation to do better.
Hall grew up in a religious household. Her father and grandfather were pastors, and she danced in her church’s gospel group. When selecting music for this season’s routines, she chose gospel songs by Kirk Franklin and Mary Mary.
“How would my grandfather look at this situation?” Hall said of her motivation before Florida. “He would look at it as an opportunity to express Christ to others.”
And express she did. The crowd was so loud during her routine that Hall couldn’t hear her music and had to improvise.
“She doesn’t need her music,” LSU coach D-D Breaux laughed. “She improvises all the time. We never see the same routine in practice that we see in competition.”
At the Florida meet, Hall’s repertoire included a springing bounce to the floor and a “dice-throw.” She continues to incorporate parts of her freshman routine featuring the music of the movie “Drumline.” While she wanted to steer her sophomore routine more toward gospel music, Hall wanted to keep with her roots from her freshman season routine, which earned her an All-American title in her first year at LSU.
Ashleigh Clare-Kearney, a five-time All-American and two-time national champion as a former LSU gymnast, is a volunteer coach at LSU and choreographs the gymnasts’ routines. She said choreographing for Hall is easy because she “goes out there and does it on her own.”
“She puts a little something different every time she does it,” Clare-Kearney said.
Whereas some gymnasts like sophomore Rheagan Courville are more ballet-oriented, Hall has a powerful dance style. When choreographing routines, Clare-Kearney accounts for each gymnast’s personality and the way they move. This mindset is especially true when choreographing for Hall.
“There’s a mentoring level to what Ashleigh Clare-Kearney does with Lloimincia … that may not ordinarily go on,” Breaux said.
When Clare-Kearney competed for LSU, she was the 2009 NCAA champion in the floor routine and vault.
“Ashleigh may have done a few things in her [2009] routine that she choreographed into Lloimincia’s routine,” Breaux said. “[They have] kind of the same performance level and the same feeding off the crowd and certainly the same power in their tumbling.”
Hall said Clare-Kearney is one of her role models and paved the way for her type of floor routine.
“When you look at how she used floor as some showing of expression … it’s like taking gymnastics and switching it to showing who you are,” Hall said.
