Barrett Nugent grew more and more frustrated with each passing race.
A high school state champion in three different events, Nugent was unaccustomed to losing in any race – hurdles or sprints. Yet there he was, struggling through a series of disappointing performances during the indoor season of his freshman season.
In the 60-meter hurdles, an event with an NCAA qualifying standard of 7.70 seconds, Nugent stumbled to an 8.13 finish in the finals of his LSU debut at the Purple Tiger Invitational. After running a 7.99 in the Big 12/SEC Challenge, he did not even qualify for the final at the New Balance Invitational after failing to break 8.00 in the prelims.
“His competitions were just horrendous in the first part of the indoor season,” said LSU head coach Dennis Shaver. “It was very difficult trying to get him to make the transition from high school and competing at that level. It was a huge adjustment. He was hard for me to figure out at first because he was not taking what he was doing in his training sessions and applying it to the competition.”
His indoor season came to a crashing halt – literally – at the University of Arkansas’ Tyson Invitational in February 2009. While racing down the straightaway intersected by one of the track’s steep banked turns past the finish line, Nugent stumbled and crashed into the padded wall awaiting finishers.
“I was stumbling the whole way, I was off-balance, and once I hit that bank there was no chance for me to even get up. By the time I hit that bank, I just flew into the wall,” Nugent said. “It wasn’t a fun time.”
The neck injury caused by his crash ended his indoor season and kept him out of competition for more than a month. For Shaver, the incident served as mounting evidence of Nugent’s inability to harness his immense talent in a higher level of competition.
“When we went to the University of Arkansas, where it’s a 60-degree banked track and you finish and you’ve got to run uphill, one of the things I always tell the guys before we go is the significance of how to handle that,” Shaver said. “Him falling is just another example of his inability to absorb and really listen to everything we were trying to teach. I didn’t think he would be able to bounce back and help our team very much at all the entire year because he was so restricted to what he could do in training.”
For Nugent, the break from competition served as a wake-up call regarding his work ethic.
“Once you get over here, it’s a completely different competition,” he said. “Everything is different. In high school, I’d beat everybody by 10 meters and it was just easy. Over here, nothing’s just handed to you. You have to work really hard at everything you do. It was a big thing that I just had to get through.”
Unquestionably, for Nugent, the losses hurt. For all the titles and records in high school, he had little experience in dealing with defeat. Throughout the outdoor season, he showed improvement in the 110-meter hurdles and qualified for the NCAA Mideast Regionals.
Potentially facing the end of his season, he put together two impressive performances and smashed the field in the regional finals. He set a facility record at the University of Louisville’s Cardinal Park Stadium and a new PR of 13.66 to win the NCAA Mideast Region crown and a spot in the NCAA Championships.
“It almost seemed like a mind thing,” Nugent said. “I had everything I needed, but my mind probably wasn’t where it was supposed to be at the beginning of the season. Toward the end of the season, I was getting beat by everybody. Finally, at the regional track meet, I decided I wasn’t going to lose anymore. I was just tired of losing. I didn’t feel like losing anymore.”
Shaver agreed that the mounting losses played a key role in Nugent’s transformation from afterthought to championship contender.
“A great competitor, as time passes, they make up their minds that they’re really not used to nor do they want to get used to constantly getting beat,” Shaver said. “Barrett, at that point in time, made a decision, ‘I really think I can do this and I need to be more serious about it.’ It wasn’t anything special we did, it was just something special he did.”
At nationals, Nugent excelled in the prelim and semifinal and cruised into the final as an All-America contender. However, he said the pressure to run a certain time caught up with him and he struggled to a ninth-place finish in his first NCAA final, just missing out on All-America honors awarded to the top eight.
“I was thinking about doing more than I could possibly do, and that’s what messed me up in the final,” Nugent said.
Nugent picked up right where he left off with the start of the 2010 indoor season as he captured titles in the 60 hurdles at both the Purple Tiger Invitational and New Mexico Invitational.
After failing to finish faster than 7.93 as a freshman, he has run under 7.80 in five of six races as a sophomore and set a new personal best of 7.71 en route to a runner-up finish at the New Balance Invite last weekend. That result currently ranks No. 3 in the NCAA this season and is just .01 seconds shy of the automatic qualifying standard for the NCAA Championships and just .03 seconds shy of breaking the LSU school record in the event.
However, Nugent said his focus is set on winning – regardless of how fast he runs.
“Once I start thinking about times, that’s when everything goes wrong,” he said. “That’s what happened to me at outdoor nationals last year. The thing about hurdles is that you have to think about every single hurdle that you go through. You can’t just run. If I think about the process of running the hurdles and doing everything correctly, that’s when everything will be smoother and I’ll run faster times.”
Shaver said that while it is likely that Nugent will break both the indoor and outdoor school records during his career, it should never be Nugent’s competitive focus.
“Records are made to be broken, but they’re rarely broken when someone is trying to break a record,” Shaver said. “They usually get broken when an athlete is trying to focus on the process of executing the race. At the end of the race, the time will come.”
Nugent even abandoned pre-race routines in order to focus more on the race itself and keep his mind free from worrying about results.
“I used to do certain things, but I changed that up,” Nugent said. “I just do my warm-up, don’t think too much, put my music on and have a clear mind and think about what I need to do.”
Ultimately, his personal improvement has also made him a better teammate. He pressured himself to give the same effort that he expects from his teammates.
“I wanted my teammates to rely on me more than they did last year,” he said. “My coach even realized that, too. He pointed me out in front of the team and asked, ‘Could we rely on you in indoor last year?’ and I said ‘No.’ He asked if he could rely on me now and I said ‘Yes.’ I wanted to be relied upon and I wanted to make a difference and get us some points (in the NCAA meet).”
Shaver noted that Nugent’s commitment to success and strong work ethic is having a ripple effect on his teammates.
“Everybody notices the sacrifices and the effort he puts into training now to get ready to compete, and they see him be successful from that work,” Shaver said. “It sends a huge message to other members of the team that if you really do believe in yourself and you’re willing to do the work on a daily basis, then you’re going to improve.”