Breaux raises gymnastics’ profile to 10

Published 7:44 am Friday, April 14, 2017

It seems a little silly to think of D-D Breaux and her LSU gymnastics team as an overnight success.

Both have been good for a while, just never this good, and never this trendy.

So the best gymnastics team in LSU history will begin its quest for a national championship tonight in St. Louis on ESPN2. The women will need to finish in the top three of their six-team semifinal grouping to advance to Saturday’s Final Six.

Don’t put it past them.

It would be an upset. The Tigers, who finished second in the national meet last year, are the No. 2 seed again this year.

The nemesis is Oklahoma, the defending national champion. LSU, which won both the SEC regular season and tournament, lost only one match all season.

It was to Oklahoma.

But there’s something to be said for dogged persistence.

Breaux has seen it, lived it.

To put it in perspective, when Breaux took over the LSU gymnastics program, the NCAA did not yet govern women’s athletics. The women performed in the tongue-twister known as the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, AIAW to its good friends, although it wasn’t much easier to pronounce.

To put it in terms LSU fans will readily understand, when D-D got her first head coaching job with the Tigers, 1978, Charles McClendon was the football coach.

That means Breaux has outlasted nine LSU football coaches and is working on a 10th — and, as a native of Donaldsonville, she can speak at least a similar language as Ed Orgeron.

This is her 40th year, which makes her the longest-lasting coach in any sport in LSU history.

It’s the second-longest tenure in SEC history. And, from the grave, famed Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp might as well concede now.

He lasted 41 years with the Wildcats.

Breaux isn’t likely going anywhere anytime soon.

She looks like, and her boundless energy suggests, that she could still take a turn on the balance beam if need be.

But this isn’t really a Title IX success story.

This is a D-D story.

Not much was handed to her over the years. Her teams have always had success even though the program was as mostly as out of mind as it was out of sight, tucked away in a dusty corner of the old Maddox Field House on campus.

Early in her reign, Breaux recalled that then-Athletic Director Bob Brodhead wanted to shut the program down and, she told Tiger Rag magazine, successor Joe Dean didn’t really seem to care if the program existed or not.

That all changed, she said, when Skip Bertman took over as athletic director after stepping down as head baseball coach in 2001.

Bertman, who knew a thing or two about start-ups, always believed in giving coaches the guidance and resources they needed, and Breaux credits his support for the awakening of the program.

Current Athletic Director Joe Alleva, she said, was instrumental in getting the Tigers into a brand-new facility of their own behind the Maravich Center. It’s a state-of-the-art practice palace that is envy even of Alabama and Georgia, the well-funded trailblazers in the sport even while Breaux was doing it with spit and baling wire.

Breaux and the women are making good on the investment.

For the last several years, LSU gymnastics has been regularly outdrawing men’s basketball in the Maravich Assembly Center.

Granted, that wasn’t too tough, and for a while it spoke as much to the state of men’s hoops as women’s gymnastics.

In the last two years, however, the gymnasts have verily packed the place, recalling the Deaf Dome glory days of Dale Brown in crowds and decibels.

They struck a nerve. This year they averaged more than 10,000 fans per meet.

It’s largely a Baton Rouge phenomena. The program doesn’t have the vast, statewide interest of baseball or (in good times) basketball.

But in the Baton Rouge area they are a hot ticket.

It’s not the usual LSU success story with alums instinctively cheering for the purple-and-gold laundry.

The cult followers seem to be as much in love with the sport as with what uniform the girls are wearing.

That, and D-D Breaux.

There’s a reason women’s gymnastics always gets prime-time television airing during the Olympics. You get that coveted female demographic, young and old alike.

It’s been a perfect match, particularly with Breaux’s exuberance leading the way.

At least one retirement village in Baton Rouge, the elderly ladies playing bingo or bridge every afternoon know every team member’s history — senior Ashleigh Gnat is a favorite — and speak of little else during afternoon gossip sessions.

They will be staying up late tonight.