Haleigh Bryant ended LSU’s regular season with a punch — of equal parts grace, skill and force.
Judges awarded Bryant’s floor exercise, the final routine of Friday’s meet against West Virginia, with a perfect 10, the third she earned that night. Her mark on floor vaulted LSU’s meet score over the 198 threshold, cementing the Tigers’ status as the No. 2 seed in Saturday’s SEC Championships in Duluth, Georgia, at 7 p.m. on the SEC Network.
With the score, Bryant increased her all-around score to 39.875, a tally that tied a 20-year-old school record. This postseason, she likely won’t exceed that mark in the all-around. And LSU won’t need her to.
But they will need, at a minimum, more strong scores from their junior all-around star, with perhaps another emphatic punch or two. Bryant, like she has all season, seems poised to deliver.
“I said Friday night about Haleigh that I’d be hard-pressed to say I’ve ever been prouder of a student-athlete that I’ve coached,” coach Jay Clark said. “I would say that about this team too.”
Only one other LSU gymnast has ever scored that high in the all-around. April Burkholder hit the mark nearly 20 years ago to the day of Bryant’s career night. On March 20, 2003, she scored a 39.875 — with 9.95s on vault and bars, a 9.975 on the balance beam and a 10 on floor exercise.
That night, Burkholder dazzled a much smaller crowd, over 200 miles north of Baton Rouge. The meet — between LSU, Texas Woman’s and Centenary — was held in Shreveport’s Gold Dome, which has a capacity of only 3,000.
“I think Haleigh’s amazing,” Burkholder said, “and I’ve enjoyed watching her the last few years. That does not come without a lot of hard work in our sport.”
“While I do believe that every record is meant to be broken,” she said, “I also think it’s a huge feat and a great accomplishment to tie a record that was set 20 years ago. Like everything else in gymnastics, that definitely doesn’t come easy.”
Burkholder — and now, Bryant — are one of only a few gymnasts who can feasibly stake a claim as LSU’s best ever. Ex-LSU coach DD Breaux remembers the record-setting performance well. She is the tie that binds the two routines. She coached Burkholder in 2003 and recruited Bryant over a dozen years later.
“It was two totally different situations,” Breaux said. “Two totally different periods in time, but the level of difficulty that April Burkholder did is equal to the level of difficulty that Haleigh Bryant is doing. They were very parallel in their gymnastics.”
Twenty years later, Breaux watched Bryant’s floor routine from a front-row seat of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, near a corner of the floor mat. She wore a pink long-sleeved shirt. As Bryant ran, flipped and tumbled in her direction, Breaux smiled and clapped after the junior stuck her first pass.
“It was probably one of the most thrilling performances that I’ve seen from someone at the collegiate level,” Breaux said. “She was perfect.”
Entering her junior season, Bryant’s career-high in the all-around was 39.750. This year, she’s already either matched or exceeded that total four times: on Jan. 20 against Missouri, on Feb. 17 in the Florida meet, a week later in Tuscaloosa and again on Friday against West Virginia.
“Every week that they’ve had adversity,” Breaux said. “It seems like Haleigh Bryant has gotten better. She’s become a little more focused. There’s no clutter in her thought process and what she’s doing. She’s focused, and she’s deliberate in everything she’s doing in her gymnastics.”
Bryant’s consistency has allowed LSU to overcome a slew of major injuries to key contributors. Her improvement has raised the Tigers’ floor and elevated their ceiling, from a team that merely hopes to make a run to the NCAA Championships, to one that can expect to, if all goes well.
“(The judges) were willing to make a statement that this performance on this night, in this arena, was special,” Breaux said. “I really respected them for their willingness to recognize perfection.”