LSU fans make presence felt in Kentucky

• By CARL DUBOIS
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: May 4, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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LEXINGTON, Ky. — Kentucky counted 979 fans passing through the gate to get inside Cliff Hagan Stadium during the two baseball games Saturday. About 200 or so wore purple and gold, and they created far more than half the noise at times.

Led by the booming voice of Chris Guillot, LSU fans made their presence felt.

“Obviously they have wonderful fans,” Kentucky coach John Cohen said. “They’re screaming and yelling their hearts out, and they’re 600 miles away from Baton Rouge.

“Boy, I’d love to have some of that.”

At times, Kentucky fans didn’t start their chants until after Guillot started his and LSU fans made the place seem like a home away from home.

The Tigers swept the doubleheader, which was made necessary by the Friday rainout. Cohen said he wished he’d waited longer, perhaps until 9 p.m. local time, to give up on playing Game 1 the night before Saturday’s twin bill.

“We’re not a good doubleheader team,” Cohen said. “We really focus and have high energy for three and a half, four hours, but you get us into an eight-hour setting and it’s hard for us to focus for that long.”

Since Cohen became Kentucky’s coach in the summer of 2003, the Wildcats have made big strides in selling season tickets and boosting crowds, but most of the 2,335 tickets sold went unused Saturday.

“We have to provide our own energy, because as you can see here, nobody’s going to provide that energy for us,” Cohen said.

Cohen played at Mississippi State, which has one of the best game-day atmospheres in the SEC. It’s easy to see the frustration of coaching in a place where that kind of crowd support is almost exclusively reserved for basketball.

“Our kids get exhausted over an eight-hour period of trying to create their own atmosphere,” Cohen said, “and it got us in the second game. It really did.

“The doubleheader thing kills us, and I know that sounds like an excuse, but we are terrible on the back end of doubleheaders because we put so much energy into every game we play.”

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