BATON ROUGE — The LSU track and field team will stage its final home meet before hosting the NCAA Outdoor Championships later this spring, when a solid field comes to Bernie Moore Stadium for the LSU Team Championships on Friday and Saturday.
Competition begins on Friday with field events at 4:30 p.m., while track events will get underway at 5 p.m. On Saturday field events will begin at 11 a.m. and track events will start at 1 p.m.
Scheduled to compete with LSU this weekend are quality programs such as the Texas men’s team, Alabama, Rice, Houston and Minnesota. The field will have a Louisiana flavor as well, as a majority of the top teams in the state will be on hand.
LSU enters the competition on the wings of a tremendous outing at Arizona State last weekend. The men’s and women’s teams combined to register 10 NCAA qualifying marks, win seven events and post three national leading marks.
With the Penn Relays coming up from April 25-27, the LSU Team Championship gives head coach Pat Henry a chance to prepare his teams for a major competition.
“This is a great environment to get some things done this weekend,” said Henry. “We’ve only got two meets before the SEC Championships and we want to use them to the best of our ability. We’ll compete a lot of people this weekend and we hope to have another productive outing.”
Henry will be very active in his use of his elite athletes this weekend as many will compete in open events for the final time before the SEC Championships.
All-Americans Muna Lee and Stephanie Durst will both double this weekend and headline the fields in the 100 and 200-meter dashes.
Both have provisional marks in the 100-meter dash already, while Lee is an auto qualifier in the 200 and Durst has a high provisional in the event.
NCAA Indoor 800-meter champion Marian Burnett will run the half-mile for the first time in Baton Rouge and hopes to move her provisional status to automatic this weekend. It will be Burnett’s second 800-meter race outdoors this season as she ran her provisional time in beating a very talented field at Stanford last month.
On the men’s side, Robert Parham will look to continue his hot streak in the 200-meter dash. The sophomore All-American ran a personal best time of 20.44 last weekend, a time that puts him third in the nation in the current rankings.
In addition, Henry will try and get solid efforts out of his short and mile relay squads with the Penn Relays a week away.
Friday’s action will include several field event finals, while track events will include prelims of the short hurdles, 200 and 400-meter dashes. Finals in those events will be contested on Saturday.