BATON ROUGE — The LSU baseball program established three national attendance records during its 2000 NCAA championship season, according to the Collegiate Baseball magazine survey released this week.
The Tigers’ total home attendance of 286,874 (including NCAA Regional and Super Regional games) set an NCAA single-season mark and ranked LSU No. 1 in the nation for the fifth straight year.
LSU’s average per game attendance of 7,355 and its total regular-season attendance of 249,501 also set NCAA records. The previous records in all three attendance categories were set by LSU in 1999.
Alabama finished No. 2 behind LSU in the 2000 total attendance survey with 211,331 fans. The rest of the Top 10 included No. 3 Mississippi State (174,592), No. 4 Texas (174,114), No. 5 Texas A&M (139,248), No. 6 South Carolina (134,207), No. 7 Arkansas (121,066), No. 8 Florida State (115,559), No. 9 Fresno State (114,232) and No. 10 Wichita State (111,110).
LSU’s 2001 baseball squad begins its five-week fall practice period Sept. 25. All intra-squad scrimmages during the fall will be open to the public.
The Tigers open the 2001 season Feb. 9 versus Kansas State in Alex Box Stadium, beginning Skip Bertman‘s 18th and final season as head coach. Bertman, who has guided LSU to five national titles in the last 10 years, announced in July that he will retire from coaching after the 2001 campaign.