BATON ROUGE — Prior to the SEC Gymnastics Championships, LSU head coach D-D Breaux figured her team would be headed to Alabama for next weekend’s NCAA Regional competition.
After posting a solid 196.300 at the conference meet this past weekend, however, the Tigers moved up in the national rankings to the No. 18 spot and back into the NCAA seeding pool and will now travel to Ann Arbor, Mich., for the NCAA Regional on April 7.
The top 18 teams in the nation are seeded for regional qualifying and the Tigers by virtue of their No. 18 ranking are automatically paired with the No. 6 and No. 7 teams in the nation.
As a result, the Tigers find themselves in a six-team region with No. 6 Stanford, No. 7 and host Michigan, No. 36 New Hampshire, No. 50 Massachusetts and No. 52 Rhode Island.
The top two finishers in each of the NCAA’s six regionals advance to the 12-team NCAA Gymnastics Championships from April 19-21in Athens, Ga.
“It’s a tough region but I like it,” said Breaux. “The bottom line is that we’re going to have to beat these kind of teams to get into the Super Six at NCAAs anyway, why not get it done now? We’ve been performing extremely well our last three outings. We knew we would be at our best later in the season, let’s take our chances in a tough region”
The only team from the region the Tigers have faced this season is New Hampshire, which LSU soundly defeated, 196.950-194.125 in Baton Rouge on March 9.
LSU will be gunning for its fifth straight NCAA Championship appearance.
Last year LSU qualified in dramatic fashion, edging Arizona State for second place and the final automatic berth at the NCAA Region III Championships in Tucson, Ariz.