BATON ROUGE, La. – Southeastern Louisiana is jumping right into the 2016 indoor track season as the Lions travel to Baton Rouge Friday for the LSU Purple Tiger Invitational.
   
"This meet is really, really early, in the sense that we literally just got our athletes back on Monday for our first training session from the break," Southeastern head coach Sean Brady said Tuesday afternoon. "This is really just a tune-up for the season that is going to begin in another week (LSU Indoor next Saturday) and even that meet is early."

    The meet is scheduled to start at 2:30 p.m. in the Carl Maddox Field House on the LSU campus. Live stats, provided by LSU, will be available at LionSports.net.

    Thirty-four letterwinners return for the Lions and Lady Lions who finished fourth and ninth at the Southland Conference Indoor Championships, respectively, in 2015. The men went on to take third and the women seventh at the SLC Outdoor Championships.

     While Southeastern will not be bringing its entire team, it will be bringing a full team with 20-plus athletes on both the men's and women's sides. Among those scheduled to compete are returning All-America throwers Jonathan Kinchen, Alex Young and Misha Frazier. Brady is also interested in how a host of newcomers will compete, including a pair of junior college transfer sprinters in Dontrell Lyons and Shadrack Adu-Gyamfi. He will also be looking to see how the Lady Lions sprinters fare against their competition.

    "I expect to see our people to compete," Brady said. "I know they are going to be a little rusty but I do expect competition. I'm not necessarily concerned with times and marks and distances and things like that, but I'm more concerned about how they execute, how they operate in an indoor situation. There are freshmen who haven't competed and for the returners, I just want to see how they are going to compete against other conferences."

    Frazier set the school indoor record in the weight throw at the LSU Invitational in 2015 with a mark of 62-8.75. Young also captured the men's weight throw while Devin King took the pole vault in his college debut. A total of 10 Lions and Lady Lions recorded top-three finishes.