Hailing from Nevada, Lisa Rennie wants to shine for the LSU gymnastics team like the neon lights of her hometown’s Las Vegas strip.
Rennie, a business freshman, performs in the bar, beam and floor lineups, but said she would like to compete in vault as well.
“This season I expect to keep improving with each meet,” Rennie said. “I really want to try to hit everything every meet. Right now I’m in the lineup in every event except vault. One of the goals for me this season is to get into that vault lineup so that I can get into the all-around lineup. That’s what I expect from myself.”
While in high school, Rennie was a member of Gymcats Gymnastics coached by Cassie Rice and Jill Entrieta. She qualified for nationals four times and finished second on bars and 10th on the beam at the 2003 national championships. Coach D-D Breaux said that Rennie is an excellent athlete.
“She’s one of the hardest working athletes I’ve ever been around,” Breaux said. “She’s really committed to what it takes to develop her gymnastics to the next level. Every time she comes in the gym she comes in with a plan of attack and is always very receptive of what we ask of her or the team as far as their training regiment, their conditioning regiment and is willing to do more.”
Rennie said she has high expectations for the team as well.
“As long as we continue to get better and don’t go back at all I think that we will definitely be up there and be able to get into the Super Six,” Rennie said.
Breaux said Rennie originally did not plan on coming to LSU, and Breaux is happy she changed her mind.
“When I recruited her I saw her out in Vegas on a recruiting trip, and she originally did not have LSU as one of the schools she was interested in,” Breaux said. “I went there and I saw her and she handed me a video tape and she said that she was being recruited by another school.”
Breaux said she thought that Rennie would immediately help the team in bars and beam, but was not expecting her to compete in floor right away. “I felt like floor was going to be a work in progress,” Breaux said. “Once we started working with her, I still believed it was going to be a work in progress. I thought maybe we could get her in the lineup by middle to end of the season and put her on a very slow pace on her tumbling.”
Breaux said Rennie responded well to the conditioning program, causing Breaux to put Rennie into the floor lineup right away.
Breaux said Rennie is a hard worker despite being an insulin dependent diabetic.
“She appears to be the specimen of good health,” Breaux said. “She is the example of what the ideal student athlete should look like as far as her musculature, but she is an insulin diabetic. The training room has told me that this is the first scholarship athlete that we’ve had that is a diabetic to the extent that she is.”
Rennie said she has been an insulin diabetic for about eight years.
“I monitor it well and take good care of myself,” Rennie said.