BATON ROUGE – There was fun. There was chaos. There was a large group of Tiger Girls on the court. And an LSU basketball coaching staff team with a head coach in Trent Johnson that looked like he was in mid-season dodgeball form.
It was all part of the second annual Maravich Maniacs dodgeball tournament organized by LSU’s basketball student support group assisted by the LSU marketing and promotions office.
The teams were divided into elimination brackets under the banner of LSU’s four retired jerseys – Bob Pettit, Pete Maravich, Shaquille O’Neal and Durand “Rudy” Macklin – with the teams named for players that those four played with in their time at LSU.
In the end, the Don Belcher team winners of the Pettit bracket, met the winners of the Maravich bracket, the Bill “Fig” Newton team in the title match with the Belcher team surviving with the most players left at the final horn of the two-minute match.
The student members of the winning team were Darren Bahnsen, Chris Kwan, Josh Priola, James Rodi and Blake Cwieka.
The members of the Fig Newton team were: Anthony Flora, Cody Bellaire, Lane Pace, Jeffery Springer and Landon Crane.
The Ethan Martin team won the Macklin Bracket: Tyler Burchfield, Ben Boswell, Matt Patterson, Dylan White and Clayton Caraway. In the Shaq bracket, the winner was the Maurice Williamson team of Shane Pantoja, Houston Keppinger, Joe Hollier, Robert Bruzdoski and Robert Karam.
The Belcher team then played the coaches in the final match of the event and that’s went most of the chaos broke out and a review of the video may be necessary before a winner can be declared.
Earlier in the afternoon, a media team of Erin Cofiell of Cox Sports TV, Michael Cauble of WBRZ, Jacques Doucet of WAFB, Matt Boudreaux of WVLA and Gordy Rush of Guaranty Broadcasting took on the coaching staff. The media tried to hold their own through two matches but was unable to beat the staff team made up of Coach Johnson, assistants Donny Guerinoni, Brent Scott, Nick Robinson and video coordinator Zach Kendrick.
The media team looked for revenge against a couple of the other teams in the tournament and finally challenged the Tiger Girls who answered with a 12-player lineup to the media’s five. It was as the media is prone to say “too much of an advantage for the media team to overcome.”
Afterwards, the Maniacs were treated to sandwiches and discussed plans for LSU’s season opening basketball game on Nov. 12 at home against Nicholls State as part of the second-ever football-basketball doubleheader on North Stadium drive at LSU.
The basketball team begins practice on Friday evening in the practice facility of the Maravich Center after media day activities on Thursday.
Follow LSU basketball on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/LSUbasketball and the Maravich Maniacs at www. Facebook.com/MaravichManiacs and on Twitter @LSUbasketball and @LSUCoachJohnson.