The Tigers earned a pair of top-five team finishes at the NCAA Championships during the 2016 season as they followed a trophy-winning fourth-place finish indoors by placing fifth nationally outdoors at Oregon’s Hayward Field last June. Leading the way were nine All-Americans in such event areas as the sprints, hurdles and relays as the Tigers again earned their place among the top teams in collegiate track and field.
They return six All-Americans to this year’s squad while adding a number of All-American caliber athletes in the field events to help fuel a national championship run this spring. Led by the likes of Tremayne Acy, LaMar Bruton, Michael Cherry, Jaron Flournoy, Renard Howell and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake along with their powerful relay teams as NCAA-title contenders and the nation’s No. 4-ranked recruiting class, the pieces are in place for the Tigers to contend for their first national championship since the 2004 season.
First in a nine-part series previews the men’s sprints and relays that are sure to burn up the track during the 2017 season.
Sprints & Relays
With NCAA-title favorites, Bowerman Award candidates and All-American hopefuls in each event, the LSU Tigers will line up in 2017 with more sprint talent than any men’s team in the country as they look to end their 13-year drought by bringing home a national championship during the indoor and outdoor seasons.
A senior-laden squad leads the Tigers into the 2017 season with Tremayne Acy, LaMar Bruton, Michael Cherry, Renard Howell, Nethaneel-Mitchell-Blake and Tinashe Mutanga all returning for their final season in Baton Rouge, while sophomore Jaron Flournoy also made his presence felt as a freshman a year ago.
The Tigers are made even stronger with the addition of junior college sprint star Chris Lewis and Trinidad & Tobago youth internationals Akanni Hislop and Xavier Mulugata ahead of the spring semester.
The Tigers hope to take their performance a step further this spring after wrapping up the 2016 season with a trophy-winning fourth-place finish indoors and fifth-place finish outdoors at the NCAA Championships. The team’s assault on a national championship in 2017 is sure to come down to its strength and depth in the sprints and relays.
British Invasion
May 14, 2016, bore witness to one of the most impressive individual displays in the long history of the SEC Outdoor Track & Field Championships when Mitchell-Blake became the first LSU Tiger to win three gold medals at the conference meet since triple Olympic Silver Medalist Richard Thompson in 2008.
While teaming with Flournoy, Howell and Acy, Mitchell-Blake first anchored LSU’s 4×100-meter relay team to an SEC title with a meet-record time of 38.33 seconds as they smashed Texas A&M’s previous mark of 38.50 by nearly two tenths of a second with the eighth-fastest time in NCAA history. After adding the title of SEC Champion in the 100-meter dash, he set the seal on the SEC Commissioner’s Trophy as the top point scorer at the meet with a 19.95 (+0.4) personal best to win the 200-meter title and emerge as the NCAA-title favorite in the event.
Mitchell-Blake’s 19.95 200 meters even sent shockwaves back to his native United Kingdom as he came within one one-hundredth of a second of John Regis’ British record of 19.94 in the 200-meter dash.
It was that performance that made Mitchell-Blake an NCAA-title favorite as the seventh-fastest collegian in history and the top-ranked 200-meter sprinter in the NCAA ranks for the 2016 season when he arrived at the University of Oregon for the NCAA Division I Outdoor Track & Field Championships making its return to Hayward Field.
Already the NCAA Indoor Silver Medalist in the 200 meters earlier in the season, Mitchell-Blake won each of his six 200-meter races through the NCAA semifinals of the outdoor season and was certainly poised to close the collegiate season as the NCAA Outdoor Champion in the event before fate intervened near the finish line of the sprint relay final.
Despite crossing the finish line as national champions in the 4×100 relay with a Hayward Field record of 38.42, the Tigers would be without their star sprinter for the remainder of the meet after Mitchell-Blake pulled up near the finish line with a hamstring injury. He would later jog an eighth-place finish in the 100-meter final before scratching from the 200 meters as LSU settled for a fifth-place team finish.
Mitchell-Blake recovered in time to make his Olympics debut for Team GB as he advanced to the 200-meter semifinals at the Rio Olympics last summer. He will go for NCAA glory again in his final season at LSU ahead of a professional career that’s sure to see him become one of the world’s best.
200-Meter U?
Mitchell-Blake isn’t the only Tiger returning with NCAA-title aspirations in 2017 as Acy and Howell have each finished fourth nationally in the 200 meters during the 2015 and 2016 seasons, respectively, as two of the top performers returning to the NCAA Division I ranks this spring.
Acy was brilliant as a sophomore in 2015 when he became one of the fastest Tigers in history with personal bests of 10.16 in the 100 meters and 20.17 in the 200 meters. Four times an All-American in his time at LSU, his fastest all-conditions 200 meters of 20.04w was run in the NCAA final that season when he used a tailwind of 2.4 meters per second to propel him to an All-American fourth-place finish.
The Dallas, Texas, native and De Soto High School product will be back to his best in his final season in Baton Rouge after injuries limited his contribution to the 4×100-meter relay during the 2016 outdoor season.
Howell certainly filled the void left by Acy in the 200 meters in his debut season with the Tigers a year ago as he finished runner-up to Mitchell-Blake as the SEC Outdoor Silver Medalist in the event before capturing All-America honors of his own at the NCAA Outdoor Championships as the fourth-place finisher in the national final last June.
The Jamaican international raced to his wind-legal best of 20.15 (+0.4) in the SEC final to become the fourth-fastest Tiger in program history. His path to the NCAA final saw Howell qualify fourth overall at the NCAA East Preliminary Rounds with a wind-aided time of 20.25 in the national quarterfinals before clocking 20.55 (-0.2) in the semifinal and 20.52 (+0.5) in the final at the NCAA Championships.
Flournoy, who joined the team last January from Westland John Glenn High School in Detroit, Michigan, showed why he is part of the Tigers’ future in the event with his performance as a freshman last spring.
Not only did Flournoy lead off LSU’s record-setting 4×100-meter relay team to SEC and NCAA titles during the outdoor season, but he was also an NCAA quarterfinalist in the half-lap event while finishing 2016 with best times of 20.53 wind-aided and 20.69 wind-legal as one of the NCAA’s leading freshman sprinters.
A native of Harare, Zimbabwe, Mutanga ran the two fastest 200 meters of his career in his first two races last outdoor season as he won the event title at Miami’s Hurricane Twilight with a wind-legal 20.52 (+0.5) before running a wind-aided 20.50 (+2.4) in a third-place finish at the Texas Invitational last April. The Oral Roberts transfer was an NCAA quarterfinalist in the 200 meters while also lining up in the national semifinals of the 100 meters with a personal best of 10.29 to his name.
Lewis arrives at LSU as a two-time NJCAA Championships Silver Medalist in the 60 and 100 meters during his two-year stint at Meridian Community College, where he set personal bests of 6.61 in the 60 meters, 10.39 in the 100 meters and 21.38 in the 200 meters.
Hislop brings an international pedigree to Baton Rouge as a two-time Carifta Games 200-meter champion at the Under-18 and Under-20 levels as the former IAAF World Junior Championships participant owns personal bests of 10.47 in the 100 meters and 20.87 in the 200 meters heading into his freshman season. Mulugata has also represented Trinidad & Tobago on the international stage during his junior career.
Cherry On Top
Two Tigers were there to pick up the baton left by 2015 NCAA Indoor and NCAA Outdoor champion Vernon Norwood and give the Tigers two of the NCAA’s leading 400-meter runners again last season with Cherry and Fitzroy Dunkley finishing the season among the nation’s elite in 2016.
Dunkley wrapped up his collegiate career as the NCAA Outdoor Silver Medalist in the 400-meter dash before lining up in the event at the Rio Olympics last summer where he also scored a silver medal as a key member of Jamaica’s 4×400-meter relay team. The converted jumper clocked his 400-meter PR of 45.06 in his final collegiate race for the Tigers while finishing as the NCAA Outdoor runner-up in the event last June.
Cherry finished just a split-second behind his teammate as the NCAA Outdoor Bronze Medalist after already bagging the bronze medal in the NCAA Indoor final of the 400-meter dash earlier in the campaign.
A native of Chesapeake, Virginia, and transfer from Florida State, Cherry flourished in his debut season at LSU as he later dropped his personal best to 44.81 in the semifinal round at the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials also held at Oregon’s Hayward Field. That performance makes Cherry the top returning collegian for the 2017 season as an early-season NCAA-title favorite in the event.
With Bruton, an NCAA 400-meter semifinalist, and Cyril Grayson also in the squad, the Tigers lined up one of the most prolific 4×400-meter relay teams in the history of collegiate track and field a year ago as they swept NCAA Indoor and NCAA Outdoor championships in the event while finishing the season just eight tenths of a second off LSU’s own collegiate record of 2 minutes, 59.59 seconds.
Like their sprint relay team, the Tigers’ 4×400-meter relay also set an SEC Outdoor Championship meet record of 3:00.48 in running away with the SEC crown before defending their NCAA Outdoor title in 3:00.69 later in the season, finishing ahead of the Florida Gators in both championship finals.
While the Tigers must find replacements with the departure of Dunkley and Grayson from last year’s team, Cherry (44.81) and Bruton (45.67) provide a solid foundation on which to build in defense of their NCAA relay titles from a year ago. Flournoy, Howell and Mitchell-Blake also saw action in the mile relay over the course of last season.
Relay Dominance
There is no denying that the Tigers have lined up the nation’s most prolific relay teams in recent years, even emerging as NCAA Champions in three of the four NCAA relay finals on the men’s side a season ago.
The 2016 Tigers became only the sixth team in collegiate history to sweep NCAA Outdoor titles in both the 4×100-meter and 4×400-meter relays with their performance at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. LSU’s men have now accomplished that feat three of those six times after also sweeping NCAA relay titles during the 2003 and 2006 seasons, while the school has won a total of 47 NCAA relay titles all-time between its men’s and women’s teams.
The Tigers will be among the NCAA-title favorites in the relays once again this spring as they return all four legs of their title-winning 4×100-meter relay team in Flournoy, Howell, Acy and Mitchell-Blake along with a pair of title winners from their 4×400-meter relay team in Bruton and Cherry. It’s that strength and depth across the sprint events that has the Tigers poised for a national championship run in 2017.