Just watching the LSU gymnastics team go through one of its new conditioning workouts hurts.
For first-year associate head coach Jay Clark, that’s the point.
“If it hurts, keep doing it!” Clark yells as his athletes frog-leap around the floor mat in their less-than-state-of-the-art practice facility. There’s a lot of work for him to do.
Clark is preparing for his first season with the Tigers after spending 20 years as an assistant, recruiter and head coach for the Georgia Gym Dogs. It was there he learned the technical, recruiting and promotional skills that long-time LSU coach D-D Breaux hopes will push the program to national prominence.
“He’s been on the road trying to get that new face of LSU out there,” Breaux said. “The new face is Jay Clark, the guy that’s been there, done that. We’re going to win championships at LSU.”
A Georgia alumnus, Clark orchestrated the past three seasons as the Gym Dogs’ head coach to mixed results. After an undisclosed circumstance prompted his resignation from the only school he’d ever known, Clark was unsure whether he wanted to continue in the sport.
That is, until the Southeastern Conference’s “Dean of Coaches” came calling.
They were more than familiar with one another, as Breaux has been the Tigers’ coach going on 36 years. She called Clark three days after his resignation as her first choice to replace Philip Ogletree, who left to fill Georgia’s assistant vacancy. It was in turn Clark’s first call received, and Breaux convinced him to take a visit to Baton Rouge with his wife, Julie.
“Through those visits I began to see that a lot of the things that I loved about Georgia were also here,” Clark said.
Clark said after a month, his initial unease turned to excitement. LSU gymnastics was a “proven product,” its top-10 consistency a plus. When he got to Baton Rouge, he saw things that could be enhanced, and he and Breaux’s short-term visions matched up. It didn’t hurt that Julie grew up in Mandeville where her family still resides.
He officially signed up for the job in July and wasted no time, setting out on the recruiting trail before he even reported to work. Clark, named the No. 9 recruiter in all of college sports by ESPNU in 2011, took over Ogletree’s recruiting coordinator spot and said he’s spent about a third of his time as a Tiger on the road.
“To me, recruiting is not sales if you know and believe in the product you’re selling,” Clark said. “I believe in it, I just need to know more about it so that I can speak more knowledgeably, and I’ve been working hard to try and learn more and more about [LSU].”
He also replaces Ogletree as LSU’s coach on the uneven bars. The apparatus was the Tigers’ worst last season, a weakness that Clark said manifests itself in both competition and recruiting. He arrived and shifted the focus from completing skills and routines to the details of the event, preferring quality over quantity.
His mantra of “championships can be won based on handstands and stuck landings” rings true for junior all-arounder Sarie Morrison, the Tigers’ All-American on the bars last season who has worked to clean up those exact things. When you focus on the little things, the routines put themselves together, she said.
“I can [now] hit my routine and not worry about hitting it in the meet,” Morrison said. “It’s just about making every little thing perfect.”
Morrison called Clark’s personality “uplifting.” Clark, who believes it’s impossible to respect someone you don’t know, used the first month of his tenure to learn about his new athletes. When the gymnasts aren’t going through one of his intense, motivating workouts, they’re laughing with him, joking about taking him to Reggie’s or chiding him during a photoshoot.
The tough love is something Morrison and Breaux appreciate.
“In the gym, he’s as tough as I am … which is a welcomed coaching comrade,” Breaux said.
Aside from his coaching duties, Breaux hired Clark for his internal and external marketing prowess. Breaux said they’re still “in the ’70s” with their current facility and hopes to break ground before next summer on a new one, which Breaux said Clark saw two of in his time in Athens, Ga. Clark is also helping spearhead a weekly television show for the team, a production he used to promote the Gym Dogs.
That kind of responsibility may breed the obvious prospect of eventually succeeding Breaux as head coach, but Clark said there was no talk of that in their preliminary conversations and that he would rather no one even speculate about it.
“She’s given me a lot of latitude so that I feel some sense of ownership in the program, but at the same time, it’s her program,” Clark said. “Quite honestly, I’m happy in this capacity right now.”
