The LSU track and field team will persevere through the weather — for now.LSU’s first home outdoor meet starts this weekend with the two-day LSU Outdoor Relays at Bernie Moore Stadium.”[The meet] should be really good depending upon the weather forecast,” said LSU coach Dennis Shaver. “It doesn’t look great. It sounds like it’s supposed to be raining through Saturday.”Shaver said the track facilities did sustain some damage but not enough to cancel LSU’s first home outdoor meet as of Thursday.  It is also the first outdoor meet where most of the Tigers and Lady Tigers are expected to compete.The athletes who participated in individual events at the NCAA Indoor Championships on March 13 and 14 didn’t run in LSU’s first outdoor meet last weekend in Lafayette.”Most everybody will be competing in some event or even multiple events in the two-day track meet [this weekend],” Shaver said.Most of the athletes on the track will run relays, including senior sprinter Trindon Holliday, who will run the 4×100-meter relay.”The performances in this meet and the one we just had will determine who all it is that we take to the Texas Relays,” Shaver said.The Texas Relays begin next Thursday, April 2, in Austin, Texas.This weekend’s meet will play host not only to college athletes, but to athletes of all ages. As many as 2,800 athletes will compete at this weekend’s meet, including an age group for “tiny tots,” “bantams,” high school, college and masters, according to a news release.Two former LSU greats will compete in their first outdoor meet of the season this weekend.Hurdler Lolo Jones will run the 100-meter hurdles, and sprinter Richard Thompson will run the 4×100-meter relay.Texas schools Baylor and TCU are among LSU’s competitors this weekend.It is a positive change moving from indoors to outdoors for two LSU sprinters.”I feel more confident in the outdoors than the indoors in both the 100 and the 200 because the indoor is based on the start so you can’t catch up with people,” said sophomore sprinter Gabriel Mvumvure. “Where I grew up [in Zimbabwe,  Africa], I never used to run indoors.”Mvumvure ran on LSU’s sprint relay teams in the 2008 season, winning titles at the Texas Relays and the Penn Relays in the 4×100-meter relays.  Junior sprinter Samantha Henry didn’t run indoors when she was younger, either.”Outdoors are more favorable to me,” Henry said. “I wasn’t accustomed to running indoors back home [in Jamaica]. Outdoors is more competitive. I like outdoors better.”The meet is scheduled to begin this morning at 10 a.m. with the field events, followed by the track events at 3 p.m. — unless weather pushes it back.—-Contact Rowan Kavner at [email protected]