BATON ROUGE – As the LSU soccer team continues its preparation for a big weekend in SEC play featuring matches at Auburn and Alabama this weekend, the Tigers took time out of their schedule earlier this week to visit patients at the children’s hospital at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center.
Among those visiting with the kids and their families on Monday afternoon were juniors Carlie Banks and Natalie Ieyoub; sophomores Nina Anderson, Shannon McLain and Alex Ramsey; and Tiger freshmen Kaley Blades, Jodi Calloway and Alex Cook. They walked room to room visiting with the families, while passing our LSU Soccer posters and signing autographs for the kids.
“Going to visit these kids was such a heart-warming experience, McLain said. “I feel very blessed to be in a team that gets to do things like this. I love kids and seeing the smiles on their faces when we just walked in was great. We all had a lot of fun and hope we helped them have some fun too.”
The LSU soccer team is the University’s community service leader as it has earned the Tiger Cup for each of the past three seasons in 2009, 2010 and 2011. The Tiger Cup is awarded annually to the athletic squad that shows outstanding performance on the field, in the classroom and in the community.
The Tiger Cup is presented each year by the Tiger Athletic Foundation at its annual Academic Excellence Gala. The award honors the most successful LSU program when combining a team’s final conference and national ranking with its performance on the field along with its cumulative team grade-point average and community service hours accumulated off the field in the previous academic year.
The SEC-leading Tigers are currently 10-4-1 on the season while sitting in a tie atop the SEC table with a 5-1 mark and 15 points in league play. They are ready to head back on the road again this weekend to face Auburn on Friday night at 7 p.m. CDT and Alabama on Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m.