The cards fell just right.
A steamy day in Athens, Ga. didn’t seem like ideal conditions for an NCAA singles championship, but it played right into the hands of LSU’s Donni Leaycraft.
The Metairie, La., native played a style of tennis that thrived upon wearing out his opponent. Using superior physical strength, Leaycraft’s skill carried him to the NCAA singles national title on May 29, 1989.
“If I play well, I might be able to enter the singles tournament and do pretty well,” Leaycraft remembers thinking. “But to win the whole thing was just beyond me. I didn’t think that would ever be a possibility for me unless everything just went right for me that whole week.”
For Leaycraft to earn LSU’s only tennis national championship in either singles, doubles or team play, everything that needed to happen, did.
His run to the title in the spring of ’89 wasn’t just a streak of good fortune. One would have to flash back to Leaycraft’s childhood to understand the string of events that brought a championship to
Baton Rouge.
Leaycraft’s staying power and stamina that would be his strength throughout college was learned when he first picked up a racket at 8 years old in New Orleans’ City Park. Current Tigers head coach and former college teammate, Jeff Brown, remembers the first time Leaycraft came to practice as a freshman.
“The first time I hit with him, he was not going to miss a ball,” Brown said. “He was really focused on not missing a groundstroke. … His father was a staunch disciplinarian when
Donni was growing up and really kept him ultra-focused on tennis.”
But before Leaycraft arrived in Baton Rouge in 1987, the key component to the Tigers’ success in the 1980s was coach Jerry
Simmons’ entrance in 1982. Hired by former LSU athletic director Bob Brodhead, Simmons had one goal in mind when he stepped onto LSU’s campus for the first time.
“Win a national championship,” Simmons said. “[Brodhead] told Skip Bertman and I the same thing. ‘If you’re not top 10 at LSU, get … out of here.’”
Simmons’ plan started off fast, as his Tigers made it to the first round of the NCAA championships three out of his first five years as LSU’s coach.
But Simmons was missing an element to his championship blueprint.
That piece came in the form of Donni Leaycraft.
“Very unusual boy,” Simmons said. “Donni was tough. You had to really win points against him. He was not going to give up points. He was going to fight you all the way. … He would run his ass off over a four or five hour match.”
It was a match made in
heaven for Simmons and
Leaycraft. For Simmons, the new recruit was the secret ingredient necessary for his championship recipe. For Leaycraft, the hard-nosed coach would be the catalyst to Leaycraft’s success.
A junior when Leaycraft arrived, Brown said coach
Simmons took over the role of the freshman’s father, Don, by keeping him in check.
No days off and a plethora of skilled teammates to compete against had the 19-year-old in phenomenal shape and fashioned a building block for LSU.
“We’d get up at 6 o’clock in the morning and do some extra hitting and stuff that I felt like I needed to work on,” Leaycraft said. “Coach [Simmons] was willing to do all that extra work with me, which I thought was great. … He had a great mindset of how to win. He knew how to teach people to win matches.”
In Leaycraft’s freshman season, the Tigers won a
school-record 23 matches and earned their first NCAA tournament win in school history. The following year, 1988, LSU reached the final of the NCAA tournament before falling to Stanford, 5-2.
Behind leadership and an undefeated record outdoors, the 1988 season remains the best in LSU history, all leading up to the ultimate accomplishment in 1989.
“Coach always preached, ‘Luck is when opportunity meets preparation,’” Brown said. He was a graduate assistant at the time of Leaycraft’s title. “Donni took advantage of [the warm weather] and did what he did best and wore some people down into ground dust basically. By the end of it, he was wearing people out left and right.”
An 85 degree, humid day in Athens proved to be the storybook setting for a chapter of LSU tennis that will never be forgotten. Leaycraft defeated Nebraska’s Steven Jung 6-1, 4-6, 6-3 that day to capture the 1989 NCAA singles championship. Twenty-five years later
Leaycraft continues to be involved in tennis as a pro at Sugarland, Texas’ Sweetwater Country Club.
Leaycraft’s title serves as the image of the LSU era tennis that is the measuring stick for future programs.
“Every time I go back [to LSU], you just feel like you accomplished something really big in your life,” Leaycraft said. “It’s something I thought would never happen.”
Eight years after Leaycraft’s legendary performance, Simmons handed over the LSU program to Brown. In his time as the LSU coach, Brown has aimed to uphold the ambitious culture that Simmons introduced to the Tigers more than 30 years ago.
And as the 2014 LSU team enters its last month of the season, former Tigers from several generations will gather Friday to celebrate that golden era of LSU tennis.
“I had a lot of international players, but one of the things I wanted to do with Donni was I wanted to win a national championship with a Louisiana boy,” Simmons said. “And he did it.”
“It’s something I thought would never happen.”

Gallery • 2 Photos

photo courtesy of LSU Sports Inf

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