Northeast Louisiana (UL Monroe) Track & Field
Photo Courtesy of UL Monroe Athletics.
Lauri Young, a national champion and nationally-honored student-athlete from Northeast Louisiana University (now UL Monroe) reigns as the 1985 winner of the Sugar Bowl’s Corbett Memorial Award as the top amateur athlete in the State of Louisiana.
Truly, 1985 was her year. In May, she capped her collegiate track and field career by winning the NCAA’s Division I heptathlon championship. Then in December, she was named as one of the NCAA’s “Today’s Top Six” honorees. These awards are presented to student-athletes who have achieved major success in athletics, shown leadership qualities, and displayed academy prowess.
From DeRidder, La., where she had been the state hurdles and high jump champion in Quad-A, she shifted, as a sophomore, to the heptathlon, a seven-event, two-day exercise in diligence and overall track and field excellence.
Her versatility began to show almost immediately with a 12th place finish in the NCAA Championships, followed by a fourth at the National Sports Festival that year. After winning her second straight Gulf Coast Athletic Association heptathlon the next year, she completed her record-setting collegiate competition by winning the NCAA title for 1985.
In the NCAA meet, she rolled up 5,723 points in the seven events, easily outdistancing the field. A four-year letterwinner and captain of the NLU track team, Young was also a merit scholar and graduated with honors – a 3.69 grade-point average (four-point scale) with a major in radio-TV management.
The award, which was incepted in 1967, is named in memory of the late Jim Corbett, the Louisiana State University director of athletics at the time of his death. Corbett committed much of his time and talent to the Sugar Bowl during his tenure as an administrator of intercollegiate athletics.
[Reprinted from the 1986 Sugar Bowl History Book]
