Winning in Every Field: Gwyneth Hughes
May 02, 2025
LSU Cross-Country and Track Athlete Pursues a Career Protecting the Coast
At sunrise, LSU student-athlete Gwyneth Hughes laces up her running shoes and hits the track on LSU’s campus. It’s an act she repeats every day as a member of LSU’s cross-country and track teams. But less than a mile away from her training, the Mississippi River flows—a constant reminder of what she’s working to preserve.
“I just love the environment, and I want to have a career that protects the environment for a long time,” Hughes said.
Hughes, who moved to Louisiana from Hawaii when she was nine, only applied to one school for college, LSU, and chose LSU because of the generous scholarships she received and the opportunity to study the coast.
“It is not just in athletics where LSU has won a lot of national championships. In the five years I’ve been here, we won a basketball championship, a baseball championship, and a gymnastics championship,” Hughes said.
“But we also win in academics, where I know the engineering program is really good and the LSU College of the Coast & Environment program is one of the best in the nation. We have a great laboratory in Louisiana.”
Hughes said it takes a lot of juggling to be successful as a student and an athlete.
“I just study on the weekends a lot to make sure that I have time to understand what I was doing, because during the week, I would be so tired that I wouldn't get as much done as I would've liked. So, on the weekends, those are my days to catch up,” she said.
But the work is rewarding, too, she said.
“When I'm ready to launch into the working world, I have the skills needed not to make excuses, that I can't take the easy way out, that I am dedicated enough, and can use the skills that I learned as a student-athlete.”
Those skills include becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable, especially when running for miles in a cross-country competition.
“I think of inspirational quotes or moments that help me push through. Like, ‘Come on, Gwyneth, you're tougher than this. You can push through. You've done this before.’ Pushing past discomfort, you realize what you're capable of,” Hughes said.
She said she recently pushed past that discomfort in the 2025 SEC Championships to earn her best score ever.
“There’s a lot of adrenaline from the being on the start line to when the gun goes off. You’re just so full of hype and I was just too excited, and I lost a lot of gas after the first mile. I fell back a lot, and I tried to move my way back up,” Hughes said. “But then there's this one point in the cross-country course where you run up the hill, and then there's this long straightaway to the finish, and I knew then, I just gave it my all. I sprinted my butt off, and I passed so many people in the straightaway, and I ended up scoring for the LSU Tigers, coming in fifth.”
She’ll cross one more finish line at LSU when she receives her bachelor’s degree in May.
“I hope to change the world by being passionate about what I do and putting 110% into what I'm doing because effort really matters in everything that you do,” Hughes said. “I can look back at my time at LSU, and I think, wow, this is where I grew up.”
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