BATON ROUGE — LSU head coach Yvette Girouard will be inducted into the Louisiana Softball Coaches Association Hall of Fame at a banquet on Friday night.
The banquet will be held in conjunction with the Louisiana High School Coaches Association All-Star doubleheader to be played on Saturday at Tiger Park beginning at 11 a.m.
The reigning SEC Coach of the Year, Girouard has spent 22 seasons as a college head coach at Louisiana-Lafayette and LSU. Girouard began her career as a high school coach at Lafayette and her alma mater, Comeaux.
With 21-straight winning seasons to her credit, she has coached 30 All-Americans, 13 Academic All-Americans and taken her teams to 12 NCAA Regionals. . Guiding LSU to its first Women’s College World Series appearance in 2001, she became just the third coach in NCAA history to take two programs to the WCWS after leading Louisiana-Lafayette to three World Series appearances in the 1990s.
Along with current assistant coach James DeFeo and former assistant Lori Osterberg, the 2001 Tiger coaching staff was named the National Fastpitch Coaches Association’s National Coaching Staff of the Year. She was also named the Coach of the Year by the Southeastern Conference and earned her third-straight Louisiana Sports Writers’ Association Coach of the Year honor.
To her credit, she was named the National Coach of the Year in 1990 and 1993 and has earned five South Region Coach of the Year honors. She has also been named coach of the year by three separate conferences: the Southeastern Conference in 200 and 2002, the Sun Belt in 2000 and the Southland in 1984, 1985 and 1987.
In 22 years as a head coach, she has compiled an 874-272 overall record and is the seventh-winningest active Division I softball coach. Perhaps even more impressive is her .763 winning percentage, which ranks fourth among active Division I coaches.
The Broussard native also served a three-year term as the South Region Representative on the NCAA All-American Committee and served two two-year stints on the NCAA South Regional ranking committee. She has most recently been named a member of a six-person panel assembled by the Amateur Softball Association and the United States Olympic Committee to develop a set criteria for teaching for teaching hitting.