D-D Breaux finally had a moment to take a step back and look at everything she overcame to cap off 40 years as head coach of the LSU gymnastics team. It was May 4, now known as “D-D Day” in her hometown of Donaldsonville, Louisiana.
The city of Donaldsonville honored Breaux with her own day following a historic 2017 season that ended with a second place NCAA finish, SEC championship and SEC regular season title.
This year alone, Breaux has been awarded the SEC Coach of the Year, Outstanding Coach of Louisiana and National Coach of the Year.
After leading her gymnastics team to its most successful year yet, Breaux was inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.
“It’s not something that you wake in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to try and go get that.’” Breaux said. “It’s part of your work day. To get the SEC Coach of the Year, National Coach of the Year and the State Coach of the Year all in one year is kind of like a hat trick. We wake up every day saying we want to get a national championship and we want to bring a national championship to LSU so that’s our goal, that’s our driving force. You just get these awards along the way.”
Breaux joined the rankings of former LSU coaches Skip Bertman and Yvette Girouard, among others in the Hall of Fame. This year, she was inducted with three other LSU sport greats — football player Eddie Kennison, coach Ray Didier and golfer David Toms.
Breaux recalls coaching when Kennison played football at LSU before he went on to play 13 years in the NFL.
“I never thought about something like this happening. I knew when it happened to [Girouard] I thought, ‘Wow that’s really cool,’” she said. “But she had retired, she was finished coaching and I’m not finished. I said in my speech, you know, unlike these other people, I look forward to getting up Monday morning and going back to work and being a part of something that’s much, much bigger than me that continues to grow and get better.”
The event takes place in Natchitoches every year, recognizing Louisiana coaches, athletes and administrators.
“There’s a tremendous amount of gratification, and it almost took on a surreal period in my life because it did represent my entire body of work,” Breaux said. “It has been 40 years of work for me. Speaking and participating in that took on a very personal and surreal feeling for me.”
However, being the head coach for LSU gymnastics wasn’t always glamorous for Breaux.
“It was an uphill battle because I didn’t have a facility, we had a very minimal travel budget, had a minimal number of scholarships,” she said. “But we immediately were able to attract some good gymnasts. We had some great kids already in place here from when it was a club sport.”
Breaux was given a corner of Carl Maddox Field House after refusing to practice in the old gym armory, which she referred to as a “nightmare.” From there, Breaux moved her team to the men’s gymnastics room on the side of the fieldhouse once the men’s gymnastics program was eliminated from LSU.
Now Breaux trains her team in one of the finest gymnastics facilities in the country thanks to the team’s success from the past season, she said.
In 1976, Breaux transferred to LSU after competing for the Southeastern Louisiana gymnastics team and serving as an assistant coach for three season. She was in graduate school to become a physical therapist until she got a phone call from Carl Maddox’s daughter-in-law about a position for the head coach of LSU’s gymnastics team.
The athletic department had just added women’s volleyball and basketball teams to comply with Title IX laws and were in the process of moving gymnastics to a varsity level sport.
Breaux jumped on the opportunity.
“I realized that LSU is the flagship university,” she said. “It is the university in the state of Louisiana and it was going to have a gymnastics program and I wanted to be the coach. I’ve been committed to it my entire professional career.”
In 1978, Breaux’s first season as head coach, her team finished ninth in the nation and that is the standard she has tried to uphold since.
Things began to change significantly for Breaux and her team when Skip Bertman became LSU’s athletic director in 2001.
Breaux said she took away a lot from what Bertman had to offer and bought into everything he wanted to accomplish, which is a big part of her own success today.
Before Bertman, Breaux’s uphill battle continued with other athletic directors who wanted to cut the program.
Breaux was persistent though and fought hard for the program that she had built from the ground up.
“We had some very lean years when different athletic directors came in, wanted to suppress and take things away from gymnastics to give it to other sports because they felt like that was more important,” she said.
In 2008, Joe Alleva stepped in as LSU’s new athletic director and immediately had visions for what he wanted the athletic department to become, Breaux said.
That’s when Breaux first brought up the idea of a new training facility for her team after growing out of the room on the side of the fieldhouse.
“He didn’t just listen to me,” she said. “He heard me and got behind me with Tiger Athletic Foundation and made that dream come true. That facility I know is a huge component in our success.”
Breaux said Alleva has given her all the tools she needs to continue building up a successful gymnastics program.
Looking back on her 40 years as head coach, Breaux reflected on the many student-athletes who have passed through her program and how much they have impacted LSU gymnastics as a whole.
“These kids truly represent the excellence of college athletics,” Breaux said. “It’s also what makes the reason so many people like me fought for women’s athletics. In 1972, when they signed Title IX, I don’t think they realized the magnitude and the difference it was going to make in so many young women’s lives.”
In 2017, the average attendance at home meets reached over 10,000. On March 5, 12,609 fans packed the PMAC to witness LSU defeat Florida to claim the SEC regular season championship.
And for the second year in a row, LSU finished second at the national championship to Oklahoma, but Breaux has no doubt her team will make it back to the Super Six with one goal in mind: a national championship.
The Donaldsonville native has committed her life to pioneering for women’s gymnastics and sees no end in sight for her coaching career.
“When I look back and I think of all the battles and all the fights and the uphill climb that was made by a lot of women, the price that we paid and the things that we had to slop through to get where we are, it’s worth every bit of it.”
