One of the most successful athletes at LSU is likely someone you’ve never heard of.
While the LSU baseball team was getting cleaned out by No. 1 Florida and both basketball teams were watching the NCAA tournament at home, senior swimmer Jane Trepp turned in a historic performance at the NCAA championships.
After rewriting the LSU record book during the regular season, she began a dominant postseason at the Southeastern Conference Championships.
She took home LSU’s first SEC event championship since 1997, winning the 100-yard breaststroke in 58.94 seconds, the first time she’d ever broken the one-minute mark.
She not only defeated reigning SEC champion Micah Lawrence of Auburn by a full second. She also shattered Lawrence’s SEC record in the event.
She ended the meet with four medals, also winning a silver medal in the 200-yard medley relay, bronze medal in the 200-yard freestyle relay and another bronze medal in the 50-yard freestyle.
In a Daily Reveille interview before the season, the Estonia native said her primary individual goal was to swim in an NCAA event final.
Mission accomplished.
Trepp became the first-ever Lady Tiger to qualify for the ‘A’ final in all three of her individual events at the NCAA championships, finishing in the top eight nationally in the 50-yard freestyle, 100-yard breaststroke and 100-yard butterfly.
She also swam in each of LSU’s relays, two of which garnered 10th-place finishes.
Because of how the meet was scheduled, Trepp swam in five races on the first day of NCAAs and six on the second — the result of competing in three events as well as relays.
So full was her schedule that a teammate had to accept her award for a seventh-place 100 butterfly finish because she was preparing to swim in the 100 breaststroke two races later.
To put her performance in context, she accounted for 41.5 of LSU’s 89 points at the NCAAs. Her individual point total was more than double the team’s entire point total from the 2010 NCAA Championships.
She holds school records in three individual events, four relays and is second all-time in another.
Ironically, it’s her attitude toward those records that may be most impressive.
On a team where the former head coach routinely pointed out his school record from 1988 had yet to be broken, Trepp said she wouldn’t mind her records being broken by teammates.
“I don’t want the team to stop improving [after I leave],” she said. “It’s kind of two-sided. Of course I want my name to be up there for another 10 years, but at the same time, I don’t want us to get stuck.”
It appears she’ll have the opportunity to make her name on a much bigger stage as well.
With the 2012 Olympics just one year away, Trepp will spend the next year training to qualify and represent Estonia in the London games.
Having already won a silver medal at the European Short-Course Championships in 2009, she has shown she can compete with not only the best swimmers in the NCAA, but also in Europe.
Just another chance to help carry a lesser-known team to new heights.
 
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Contact Ryan Ginn at [email protected]