Twenty-four purple and gold routines and 21 gymnasts all on one stage created a night to remember in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Saturday.
While No. 2 LSU took home the Baton Rouge Regional champion crown and punched its ticket to the national championship semifinal round in Fort Worth, Texas, it saw a night of highs and lows that displayed its core values as a team.
“As I’ve said before, this team’s full of fight,” head coach Jay Clark said. “Whenever we’ve faced anything that kind of gets in the way, or we seem a little off, they don’t quit, and that was the key today, was just stay in there and just keep punching.”
Saturday night’s fight was fueled by something that both Clark and junior Kylie Coen have spoken on in the past, and that is that when the Tigers deliver a routine, they aren’t doing it for themselves, but for the other 20 women on their team.
Each of the gymnasts on LSU’s team has their own way of showing compassion for their teammates during competitions. For Coen, she reminds herself of that by drawing the number ‘21’ on her hand before each meet, and for sophomore Lexi Zeiss, she can be found by her teammates’ sides at any point of the night, ready to offer words of encouragement or a shoulder to lean on.
“Z [Zeiss] is a special kid,” Clark said. “In terms of consistency of mind, and competitive drive, and caring about her teammates and coming in the gym every day happy and with a smile on her face, she’s the same kid every single day, and she provides us a great deal of energy and consistency with her approach day in and day out.”
Not only did that kind of consistency lead the Tigers to their victory tonight, but it’s what drove them to push harder following junior Konnor McClain’s unanticipated injury on the uneven bars at the end of the second rotation.
“I just told them [her teammates] to breathe and believe,” Coen said following the injury. “And I believe in this team. I know they’ve got my back, so that’s all I had to go and do, is what I do every single day.”
Coen’s lead-off role on Saturday night set the tone for the rest of the meet. At the start of the second half, and the first routine since McClain’s injury, she scored a 9.900 on the balance beam, tying her season high on the event.
As the words “breathe and believe” trailed through the Tigers’ minds, they delivered a smashing performance in the third and fourth rotations, with sophomore Kaliyah Lincoln earning her first career 10, which was awarded to her following her floor routine.
Yet, for Lincoln, it seems like that 10 wasn’t just for her, but for McClain as well as her 19 other teammates.
“All I could think about before I went was ‘just go out there and do what you need to do for this team,’” Lincoln said. “And I feel like that’s exactly what I did. And after my routine, I didn’t really realize why everyone was screaming, because I couldn’t see, but I just had so much fun celebrating with this team, and it was a time like no other.”
Obviously, this heartwarming mentality isn’t new to LSU gymnastics, but it has remained strong even as the competition gets harder.
While Clark acknowledged that no team in the country “feels great” at this point of the year in relation to injuries, there are still several teams that are hunting towards those four spots in the final round of the championship competition, and LSU is, of course, one of them.
To secure a spot in the final round, and potentially yet another championship title, the Tigers are going to have to continue to bring the same kind of fight that they did on Saturday night, and most importantly, remember who they’re fighting for: all twenty-one of them.
“They stay where they should, mentally and emotionally,” Clark said. “We were not sharp by our standards, and so we have to learn the lessons of that and make sure that whatever adjustments we can make, from a mental standpoint, we’ll make.”
