BATON ROUGE – One week after facing Auburn in the Cancun Classic, the LSU gymnastics team will see Auburn again as both sets of Tigers will compete at 7 p.m. CT Friday in LSU’s home opener inside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
Tickets are still available for the meet by visiting www.LSUtix.net, calling 225-578-2184 or at the arena before the meet. Tickets are $5 for adults and $3 for youth ages 3-12. Season tickets are also available at a cost of $25 for adults and $15 for youth.
LSU (0-4) will look to rebound after last week’s 192.500 team score in the season opener in Cancun that saw the Tigers start off strong with a 49.200 on vault before faltering on bars and beam.
“Consistency is going to win, and we saw that in Cancun,” head coach D-D Breaux said. “We saw some good teams be consistent and beat us. We lost our consistency after our first event.”
Several Tigers performed well individually in Cancun and will seek to carry the momentum from those performances into the home opener. Rheagan Courville finished third in the all-around with a 39.175 and recorded scores of 9.875 on vault and 9.825 on bars.
Courville’s 39.175 is the highest all-around score by a freshman in a season opener in LSU history, besting April Burkholder’s 38.700 in 2003.
Lloimincia Hall posted a 9.90 on vault in her first event as a Tiger and ended the meet with an electric 9.85 in the anchor spot on floor. Ashley Lee and Kaleigh Dickson earned 9.80’s on vault and floor, respectively, while Jessie Jordan scored a 9.80 on floor and Lainie Fleming tallied a career-high 9.70 on bars.
Breaux said the goal against Auburn is to work for solid scores throughout the lineup.
“Our game plan this week is to push for consistency and try to get our measure of performance where it needs to be to compete at this level,” Breaux said. “We are a great team, but we just did not show it in Cancun.”
Auburn (2-2) is led by senior Kylie Shields and junior Petrina Yokay who both compete in the all-around. Yokay finished a quarter tenth ahead of Courville for second in the all-around in Cancun with a 39.200, and Shields scored a 39.025. Shields posted Auburn’s high score of the meet with a 9.875 on bars.
LSU leads the all-time series with Auburn 63-13 after the loss in Cancun, and LSU is 19-4 against Auburn in Baton Rouge.