BATON ROUGE – With a month of the 2017 indoor season now in the books, the LSU Track & Field teams will continue to push for NCAA Championship qualification this weekend as they compete at the New Mexico Collegiate Classic in Albuquerque while also playing host to the Bayou Bengal Invitational in Baton Rouge this weekend.
Admission is free to the Carl Maddox Field House for the Bayou Bengal Invitational on Friday afternoon as the early field events are scheduled to start at 12:30 p.m. CT followed by the first preliminary races on the track at 3:30 p.m. Delta Timing will provide live results from the meet as fans can follow along at http://results.deltatiming.com/lsu.
Selected sprinters and hurdlers from LSU’s men’s and women’s teams will compete at the two-day New Mexico Collegiate Classic being held Friday and Saturday at the Albuquerque Convention Center.
Live coverage for both meets will also be provided across the team’s social media channels as fans can track all the action by following @LSUTrackField on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/lsutrackfield and Instagram at http://www.instagram.com/lsutrackfield and by liking the LSU Track & Field page on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/lsutrackfield.
The Fields
Alabama will join LSU in highlighting Friday’s Bayou Bengal Invitational as the field also boasts Alcorn State, Grambling, Hinds Community College, Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana Tech, McNeese State, New Orleans, Nicholls State, Prairie View A&M, Southern, Southeastern Louisiana, Texas A&M-Kingsville and Texas Southern
Those Tigers and Lady Tigers lining up at the New Mexico Collegiate Classic on Friday and Saturday will run alongside athletes from Ole Miss, Texas, Texas Tech, USC, UTEP and New Mexico. Rounding out the field over in Albuquerque are Angelo State, CSU-Pueblo, Eastern New Mexico, Lubbock Christian, Metro State, New Mexico State, New Mexico Highlands, New Mexico Junior College, Sam Houston State, University of the Southwest, UACJ, UC-Davis, Utah State and Wayland Baptist.
NCAA Leader
The Bayou Bengal Invitational gets underway at 12:30 p.m. CT with the men’s weight throw competition as LSU senior Johnnie Jackson looks to get the Tigers off to a fast start in this weekend’s action.
Jackson is just two weeks removed from throwing an NCAA-leading 77 feet, 3 ¾ inches in his season opener at the Auburn Indoor Invitational on Jan. 21 as he remains nearly two feet ahead of Kansas’s Gleb Dudarev’s 75-5 ½ on the national list. Jackson’s seasonal best also has him within 10 inches of LSU’s school weight throw record of 78-1 set by Walter Henning at the SEC Indoor meet in 2010.
Brisco’s Back
Junior All-American Mikiah Brisco made her long-awaited season debut at the Razorback Invitational last weekend after sitting out the first three meets of the season with a minor hamstring injury. And she did so with a near personal-best performance in winning the women’s 60-meter dash at Arkansas’ Randal Tyson Track Center last Saturday.
Brisco followed a season-opening run of 7.23 seconds in her first race of the campaign in the preliminary round with a winning 7.19 in the final to rank third on the NCAA list in the event this season. She is already within striking distance of her personal-best time of 7.17 set in finishing as one of the nation’s best as the NCAA Indoor Bronze Medalist as a sophomore last March.
Friday’s action at the Bayou Bengal Invitational will see Brisco open up in the 60-meter hurdles for the first time this season after finishing fifth nationally with a personal best of 8.04 in the NCAA Indoor final in 2016.
New Mexico Openers
Many of LSU’s athletes continue to open up a month into the 2017 season as reigning NCAA Indoor Silver Medalist Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake headlines a host of Tigers running their specialty events for the first time on Friday and Saturday as he debuts in the 200-meter dash at the New Mexico Collegiate Classic.
Mitchell-Blake is coming off a junior season in 2016 in which he scored the NCAA Indoor silver medal in the men’s 200 meters while finishing the season with an indoor personal best of 20.51 in the event. He then made his name outdoors while nearly setting the British record in the event with a wind-legal 19.95 to win the SEC Outdoor title before later advancing to the 200-meter semifinals at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Other All-America hopefuls and NCAA-title contenders opening up for the Tigers in New Mexico are senior Tremayne Acy in the 60 and 200 meters and sophomores Donte Jackson in the 60 meters and Jaron Flournoy in the 200 meters.
Up Next
After splitting up this weekend for the Bayou Bengal Invitational in Baton Rouge and New Mexico Collegiate Classic in Albuquerque, LSU’s teams will be back in action next weekend with stops in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for the Tyson Invitational and Ames, Iowa, for the Iowa State Classic as both meets will run two days from Feb. 10-11.