Rouchon signs track scholarship with Butler Community College

By CORWIN MURRAY
Tre’vions Rouchon will be remembered as a key member of Franklin’s 2015 Class 3A state runner-up track team.
He was the Class 3A 400-meter state champion and a record-setter as a member of the Hornet’s 4x200-meter state championship relay.
Rouchon, along with Charles Webb, Hakim Ruffin and Alvontre Perro won the Class 3A state championship in a Class 3A-record 1:25.40.
They easily outdistanced second-place Jewel Sumner, who ran a 1:28.31, and broke Port Allen’s 2009 record of 1:25.85
Rouchon had a creative final lead in the event.
Rouchon began to lose his participant bracelet, so he ran the final leg holding the bracelet with his teeth.
“It wasn’t really that hard,” he told NOLA.com|The Times Picayune. “I just had to breathe with my mouth closed. That’s what everybody remembers. But it wasn’t nothing.”
Track aficionados, however, will remember Franklin’s dominance on the track.
Franklin won five of the seven track events it entered (placed second and third in the other two races), totaling 68 points for a second-place finish behind state champion John Curtis.
Franklin had no field participants.
“We worked really hard as a team and we wanted to win for Coach (Kenneth) Lockett,” Rouchon said. “He has been sick, but he still comes out to work with us when he can. He believed in us, so we wanted to make him proud.”
Rouchon will run the 400-meters at Butler Community College for the next two years with his sights set on an NCAA Division I scholarship.
He won the state crown in the 400-meter with a time of 48.51.
“They have a couple big schools talking to him now, but we have a plan and we’re sticking to it,” Franklin Assistant Coach Mark Ruffin said. “If he continues to improve like he did the last couple years of high school, then the sky is the limit. He’s a good kid, and while most of the other track signees are taking it easy, he’s training every day in the heat.”
Lockett, the longtime Franklin coach, kept tabs on his talented sprinters even when he couldn’t be there.
“I’ve been friends with Coach Lockett for 45 years,” Franklin City Councilman Lester Levine said. “He had me keeping an eye on them since he’s been ill, and it feels good to see one of these kids go to college because they really work hard. It was kind of a tough season this year because I think the kids were taking Coach Lockett’s illness really hard. But things got going again when Mark Ruffin came along to help. These kids will always be special because they did so good without anybody in the field events. People will always wonder what they would’ve done if they just had a couple points from field events.”
Rouchon, the only senior sprinter, believes it’s just the start for his teammates.
“Man, they’re very talented, and they work really, really hard so I know they will handle their business, and if we can get more kids out, they will win one.”