Nobody shows more love and pride for LSU than gymnastics coach D-D Breaux and senior all-arounder Shae Zamardi.
“It just blew me away,” Zamardi said. “And then D-D and Jay [Clark] are just incredible people and coaches, and just to see her pride about LSU and her enthusiasm for the program, I couldn’t turn it down.”
In her 40 years as a coach, Breaux’s passion for the University and the program itself has drawn gymnasts, year after year, to attend and compete for LSU.
“I think that’s a good thing,” Breaux said. “I’m passionate and I’m persuasive and I love what I do. I think that I want kids to come and have the epitome of the LSU experience, and I think she has done that.”
For someone who has never heard of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, much less LSU, it didn’t take much to convince Zamardi to leave her home in Vancouver Island to attend LSU.
For Zamardi, it was love at first sight after seeing LSU’s campus.
“I came down for a visit, and when I tell you, I was walking around with, like, heart-eyes the whole time,” Zamardi said. “It was amazing. I never experienced anything like it.”
To Zamardi, LSU football games seemed like something that came out of a movie.
While Zamardi had no clue how Breaux found her in Canada, Breaux remembers finding her stats and making a trip up north.
Breaux said she made multiple trips to Canada when Zamardi was around 14 years old and watched her grow but was really attracted to her talent on bars.
Throughout her career as a Tiger, Zamardi has provided depth on both bars and floor, with career highs of 9.90 and 9.925, respectively. She has not scored lower than a 9.80 on either event all season.
“Probably very few times have we not counted her score in the times that she has competed,” Breaux said. “I’m not one to go back and look at statistics like that, but she has [shown] a very strong level of consistency in the events that she does.”
“She has such a joy and such an energy about her,” said senior all-arounder Ashleigh Gnat, who is also Zamardi’s roommate. “She’s always happy and optimistic about the smallest things, and she is really just such a light to be around. She’s so funny and outgoing and it’s really been fun to live with her.”
Breaux describes Zamardi as a “unique character” and a “loving soul.” Breaux jokes that she gets these characteristics from her parents who “live on the side of a mountain in Canada.”
“We are so different culturally,” Gnat said. “At the same time, we have just been brought together by our love for the University, our love for gymnastics, and we’ve grown to become just complete sisters.”
Zamardi, along with Gnat and senior all-arounder Sydney Ewing, has watched the gymnastics program grow into a sport that rivals the likes of baseball and basketball fans on LSU’s campus.
Zamardi remembers her first meets in the PMAC being nowhere close to the crowd the team has today.
“It gives me so much pride just knowing that we were a part of that,” Zamardi said. “You know, Ashleigh Gnat, Sydney Ewing and Shonacee Oliva, we all came here together, and they’ve become my sisters. Each one of us has helped this program and just to know that, and know that D-D believed in us, that we could do it, and look where we are now in this amazing facility, it’s just awesome.”
Zamardi plans to return home to Vancouver Island eventually, but for now, she has found a home in Baton Rouge.
“I’m really sad about it because this has been the greatest four years of my life,” Zamardi said. “Being all the way from Canada, I didn’t really know what to expect coming down to the U.S. and college gymnastics, so it’s been absolutely amazing and it’s changed me as a person. Just having amazing coaches and teammates has just been the best part, and it’s sad, but I’m just taking it every single moment and trying to live it up.”