LSU hosted the track program’s official opening to the outdoor season Friday and Saturday with the LSU Relays at the Bernie Moore Track Stadium.
The No. 3 Tigers and No. 2 Lady Tigers combined for 13 event titles on the weekend, including four of the six relays LSU competed in.
The Tigers were still competitive in the meet despite having a rough week of practice due to the midweek rain storm that hit Baton Rouge.
“We were going to work a lot on our relay exchanges,” said LSU coach Dennis Shaver. “Especially in the 4×200 and the 4×100, but this week, with the weather, we just didn’t get a chance to do it. Even on the women’s 4×200 relays, they were very conservative on the exchanges.”
The Lady Tigers earned three relay titles in the two-day event, with the closest race being the 4×200 in which LSU-A squeaked by LSU-B by two seconds.
In the 4×400, the team of seniors including Cassandra Tate, Semoy Hackett and Rebecca Alexander joined junior Kimberlyn Duncan to post the nation’s top time at 3:36.21. The same team, with the exception of sophomore Jasmin Stowers running instead of Tate, posted the nation’s No. 2 time in the 4×100 relay with a time of 43.86 seconds.
Freshman sprinter Aaron Ernest stole the spotlight from his upperclassmen teammates for the second consecutive week with his come-from-behind win in the 100-meter dash Saturday.
Ernest took home his second consecutive 100-meter title in as many meets when he overtook senior All-Americans Barrett Nugent and Keyth Talley. The Tigers swept the event with three of the five sprinters placing in the race and Ernest posting a 10.27 time, .01 seconds faster than Talley. The time puts Ernest at the No. 3 spot in the nation for the 100-meters.
“Those are big personal bests,” Shaver said. “As always, we just really want to see consistent performances from them. It’s a little different meet at Texas and we’re going to see if under those circumstances as I said to the team, we have to be able to deal with the elements and still be able to have success.”
LSU will travel to University of Texas on Wednesday for the Texas Relays in hopes of continuing its pursuit of the top rankings.
“It was good to see everyone on our squad get to come out here and get to compete at some capacity,” Shaver said. “I know that the intensity level of what we’re going to try to get done at Texas will be a little higher than what we were able to get here. The only thing that happened here for us was that we had really nice weather to try and do things.”
 
 
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Contact Michael Gegenheimer at [email protected].