Lady Tigers win national outdoor track and field championship

This year’s NCAA Division I Outdoor Track and Field Championships unfolded exactly the way that LSU head coach Dennis Shaver had anticipated with the women’s race for the team championship coming down to the very last event of the weekend.

With 20 events already in the books, the Lady Tigers and the Sun Devils of Arizona State were tied with 59 points each and both teams advancing a 1,600-meter relay into Saturday’s final.

The stage was set for a dramatic conclusion to an already exciting four days of competition at historic Drake Stadium on the campus on the Drake University. The team that crossed the finish line first would walk away from the meet as national champions of the 2008 outdoor season. With a national television audience tuning in to CBS’s coverage of the meet’s final day, Shaver elected to run with a team of senior Brooklynn Morris, senior Kelly Baptiste, sophomore LaTavia Thomas and senior Deonna Lawrence looking to end a five-year drought by winning LSU’s first outdoor national championship since the 2003 season.

The result was a seasonal best of 3:28.33, which was good for second place and eight points and the title. ASU finished fifth.

“There’s no better time to run a seasonal best than at the NCAA Championships,” Shaver said. “Our girls were well-prepared coming into the meet, and they certainly performed very well out there today when the championship was on the line. I made a point to tell each of them to just be calm and relaxed in the race, and I was confident that they would pull it out. If we wouldn’t have beaten Arizona State, then we just weren’t destined to win the track meet.”

The Lady Tigers were fortunate enough to cross the finish line ahead of the Sun Devils and win LSU its 31st NCAA team championship in program history nearly 75 years to the day that the Tigers won their first national title way back on June 17, 1933.

It also marks the first time in his four years at the helm of the program that Shaver has led LSU to a national championship in the sport that has given the school more titles than any other team.

“I’ve been around for a lot of national championships, but this one is special because it’s my first as a head coach,” Shaver said. “I’m even more excited for our kids because they’ve worked extremely hard for us this year, and it’s great to see all of their hard work pay off. That’s the most satisfying thing, especially for our seniors who went out as national champions for the first time.”

Baptiste played a key role in LSU’s championship run as she was also the fourth-place finisher in the 200 meters earlier in the afternoon after crossing the finish line with a time of 22.95.

This came just one day after Baptiste won her first career NCAA title in the 100-meter dash and ran the anchor leg on the Lady Tigers’ 400-meter relay team that was the NCAA runner-up on Friday evening. She led the Lady Tigers by scoring a total of 19 points for the meet.

In all, Baptiste ran a total of nine races on the weekend, including three rounds of the 100 meters, three rounds of the 200 meters, two rounds of the 400-relay and the final of the 1,600-meter relay.

“I’ve only run on the 4×400 twice this year, but it’s always been in the back of my mind that I might be asked to do it when my team needed me to,” Baptiste said. “Coach Shaver told me the whole season that if the team ever needed me that he would put me on it. He did today, and I was definitely prepared for it. I wanted to put it all on the line for my team to win the title.”

The Lady Tigers have now won a total of 25 NCAA team championships in the history of the women’s program. The LSU women have won an impressive 11 NCAA Indoor titles and 14 NCAA Outdoor titles as their outdoor total is 10 more than the four national championships won by Texas.

The men’s team just missed winning a national championship of its own by finishing the meet in a tie for second place with the Auburn Tigers at 44 points. The Florida State Seminoles defended their NCAA Outdoor crown with 52 points as they have now won three straight NCAA titles at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships.

Only two Tigers stepped onto the track during the final day of the competition, and senior sprinter Richard Thompson gave LSU eight points in the men’s race with a second-place finish in the 200-meter dash.

Thompson clocked a time of 20.44 into a stiff headwind as he finished runner-up to defending champion Walter Dix of Florida State (20.40) by a split second. It was Thompson’s third All-America honor for the meet as he also won NCAA titles by winning the 100 meters and running on the Tigers’ 4×100-meter relay on Friday evening.

Senior Elkana Kosgei earned All-America honors of his own with a fourth-place finish in the 800 meters as he crossed the finish line in 1:47.34. In his one and only season at LSU, Kosgei proved to be one of the nation’s premier 800-meter runners as he was the national runner-up in the event at the NCAA Indoor Championships.

With their effort, the Tigers finished among the top five teams at the NCAA Outdoor meet for the ninth straight season dating back to a fifth-place finish in 2000.

Not only did the Lady Tigers win an NCAA team championship, but the Tigers and Lady Tigers combined to win four individual event titles on the weekend to go along with an impressive total of 15 All-America honors earned by LSU athletes.

LSU athletes on both the men’s and women’s sides have also combined for an impressive total of 65 individual and 29 relay titles all-time at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, while they have also received a total of 1,024 All-America selections in program history dating to the first time the team stepped onto the track in 1897.