SFA Cross Country Heads to Memphis
10/5/2007 12:00:00 AM | Cross Country
Oct. 5, 2007
NACOGDOCHES, Texas - The Stephen F. Austin cross country teams will continue their season Saturday night when they head to Memphis, Tenn., to compete at the Brooks Memphis Twilight Classic. With 46 teams each entered in the men's and women's races, this weekend's competition will be the first big meet of the season for SFA. The Lumberjacks and Ladyjacks are both coming off third-place finishes at last week's Islander Splash.
"With last week being our first real race of the season, I thought it was a solid opener for us," SFA coach Lou Snelling said. "Our goal this week is to take the next step and get past the issues that you usually have in your first race."
Snelling plans to use the same lineups he put in uniform at last week's race. For the women, that means all nine Ladyjacks will race. In Corpus Christi, SFA's top five finished in the top 30 scoring runners. The Ladyjacks were paced by a fifth-place finish from senior Katrina Nicholas, who completed the 5,000-meter course in 17:52. SFA scored 91 points as a team to finish behind Texas and host team Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and 49 points ahead of Houston.
"We're looking to bring down the gaps between our first and fifth runners," Snelling said. "We're looking for some of our girls to race up to their fitness level this week. We had a few who maybe didn't do that the first week, because of some of those minor issues related to it being our first race."
Juniors Cole Hollingsworth, Gerardo Moreno and Aaron Hohn, along with redshirt freshman Elliot Starcevich and true freshman Dennis Yeats, will run in uniform Saturday for the Lumberjacks. The same quintet posted 103 points in a third-place finish at Corpus Christi. Yeats led the charge with a 13th-place time of 27:06 on the 8,000-meter course, and the first four Lumberjacks finished in the top 25 scoring runners.
"We'll run the same five in uniform this week, and we're looking for the same thing with them as with the women," Snelling said. "We're trying to take that next step in race fitness and performance."
The Memphis Twilight collegiate races will begin with the women's 5,000 meters at 8:10 p.m. The men's 8,000 meter race will follow at 8:50. The meet will be held at the Mike Rose Soccer Complex in Memphis.
"This will be a complete 180, in terms of the course," Snelling said. "Corpus was hilly and slow. Memphis will be flat and fast with good footing. It should give us more of a true picture of our fitness level at this point in the season."
-- SFA --
