Got there!
The dream is real.
After decades of waiting, hoping, praying that we could see this moment, it’s real, D-D’s baby is finally a champion. LSU clobbered its way to a national title Saturday with a 198.2250 to beat Cal, Utah and Florida and earn their spot as the eighth program with an NCAA women’s gymnastics championship. This won’t be a typical breakdown of the meet itself, that’ll come in due time. I’m going to use this as a chance to let out how I feel and why it meant so much to me to the point where I learned what tears of joy feel like.
For those of you who read this, you get why that moment meant so much. It was the culmination of years of torturous closeness feeling like the championship was so close yet so far. For decades, LSU had to deal with Georgia, Alabama, UCLA, Florida and Oklahoma as their barriers to the top even with the best teams ever. In the arena that day were bastions of the 2017 team, the greatest in the program’s history that never won it all. Sarah Finnegan and Kennedi Edney watched on from the stands, Myia Hambrick watched on as her Utah team emulated the Oklahoma vault rotation that set up such an incredible final and Ashleigh Gnat got a front-row spot. Of all the ways this meet could end, it was on beam with Aleah Finnegan needing to drop the so-called “sloth fall” of Savannah Schoenherr in the second spot. LSU had five scores of at least 9.9500 and in a moment reminiscent of one in which she fell two years earlier that eliminated LSU from regionals, she knocked it out of the park. A highly partisan crowd inside Dickies Arena went into a frenzy the second she hit the landing and the tears poured from her eyes.
I was in section 119 and was alone at the media table, thankfully. I was as close to panicking as possible and probably would’ve had a heart attack if she fell. When she landed it, I went into a state of unbridled happiness. The first three rotations were incredible, but I will remember that last one the most because of the sheer anxiety I felt. As it gave way to triumph and the emotions washed over me, I felt so proud of them. Those aren’t a group of random athletes, they’re people I’ve come to know and love. Aleah gave me the chance to tell my first ever feature story back when she was a freshman gearing up for her first elite competition. Kiya and I became good friends who even met up before the 2023 season. Haleigh helped relax my nerves my first year of covering LSU by acknowledging I was there and making me feel welcome. I can name plenty others, but they were the ones who were part of that beam rotation.
We are national champs. I feel entirely comfortable using that term when talking about this because it’s a collective unit that sprung this team to victory. It’s the team alumnae stretching back to 1975 that built the foundation, it’s the coaches and managers of the past that helped keep things going, it’s the administrators who were willing to fight alongside D-D Breaux in the 1980s and ‘90s when the majority were against her, it’s the fans who showed up when they competed in the Fieldhouse or in a PMAC with a curtain covering half the building so they didn’t have to clean the whole thing after meets, it’s the people who were willing to do the work to market the team, it’s the students who showed up as undergrads and became season ticket holders, it’s the other gymnasts whose careers exist because of this program, it’s the people in the creative staff past and present who learned how to shoot athletes and edit because of this program, it’s the idiots like me who run their mouths online a bit too much because this sport matters to them like baseball and football, and it’s you out there who don’t fit into any of those categories but still watch and care about this team.
There are people who watch other sports or root for other schools who won’t get why tomorrow’s parade is going to be as big or bigger than the parade for women’s basketball. I want to explain why. There are currently 86 women’s gymnastics programs across the NCAA and NAIA, and we just lost one of them (RIP Lindenwood). Gymnastics is a very niche sport. Athletes don’t have a pro league after college and the best ones tend to peak very young when looking at Olympians. The days are long and grueling, and many of the people at the schools you see on a weekly basis didn’t have a traditional high school experience if they even went to high school. The community within it is very tight and loving. The idea of rooting for failure is foreign because it’s way better to succeed. Go look up how Arkansas reacted to LSU winning the title or how Cal and Stanford embraced each other after advancing out of their regional. So many of those gymnasts grew up watching LSU on TV or in person. They were fans of Ashleigh Gnat, Rheagan Courville, Kennedi Edney and Sarah Finnegan. Ruby Harrold introduced an entire country of young girls to college gymnastics. This is a truly national championship felt in the hearts of people from Alaska to Massachusetts to Florida to California.
It feels awesome, and it’ll be so much fun to be at the parade tomorrow at 6:30. Go crazy folks, it’s a dream we don’t have to wake up from!