LAFAYETTE – The 11th-ranked Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns softball team was selected as the favorite to finish atop the 2016 Sun Belt Conference standings and senior catcher Lexie Elkins was chosen as the Preseason Student-Athlete of the Year in the preseason picks voted on by the conference's nine head coaches and released on Tuesday.
Louisiana, which finished the 2015 campaign with a 42-12 record and claimed its 13th Sun Belt Conference regular season championship in the 15 years of league competition since 2001, returns all but one of the nine hitters from its 2015 starting lineup that produced a school-record 116 home runs.