Nicholls track teams look to build upon outdoor opening-week success at LSU meet

Coming off the outdoor season opener at the Louisiana Classics last week in Lafayette in which numerous members of the Nicholls track team set personal bests, the focus for the LSU Keyth Talley Invitational on Saturday in Baton Rouge will be building upon those results.

An example of that will be Nia Maye. The freshman set personal records with her time of 12.12 in the 100 meters and 24.81 in the 200, and she will run a longer distance in the LSU meet.

“Nia Maye ran really well on the 100 and the 200 last week, and so she’s actually running the 400 and the 200 this week,” Nicholl coach Stefanie Slekis said. “The 400 is before the 200, so she will be fresh, and I’ll be excited to see what she can run in the 400. Last year she ran really well at LSU in the 400. We’re excited to see how she will do after having those two personal bests in the shorter sprints.”

Building upon a previous good effort, Slekis said, doesn’t always mean moving up to a longer distance.

“Our 800 group will race in the 600 in this meet,” the Nicholls coach said. “That will be really good for them to be able to work on getting out a little bit more aggressively. That was one of the things we talked about.

 “We have a group running the 1500 again and then everyone else that’s doing their normal events.”

Generally, it is more of a progression as the season goes along.

“You saw that same pattern with Mia who ran the short sprints, now she’s going up to long sprints. It just depends on the athlete, but you do kind of see that (being) typical unless you think that they’re really ready to go in their main event at the first meet like Danya (Satterfield) did great in the 100 hurdles. She’s actually now going to run the 400 hurdles this weekend, so I guess you do still see us doing that same thing where we’re starting with a shorter distance and then moving up in distance as we keep getting better and keep having good meets.”

While the goal is to improve from week-to-week, the result might not always reflect the sentiment. For better or worse, each result can be a learning lesson.

“We kind of practice like having good reps is a good thing,” said Slekis. “So let’s say for someone like Kassidy (Besson) starting the 1500 again, let’s say she does run slower than last weekend, how we’d approach that is probably how did she ran tactically at LSU? So let’s say maybe she makes some errors at LSU, and that’s what slows her down. Tactically, you learn from those to be ready prelim round to a final round at the conference meet, so we kind of focus on like the learning points.

“Or maybe a hurdler doesn’t do as well the second meet as the first meet, it probably most likely is gonna be because of how they get out of the blocks, or how did they do over each of the hurdles. We look at that after the race, like what did you do well, what can you improve on. So someone doesn’t see that time improve well, what are the other things that have been different that week compared to the previous week?”

With the outdoor season, there are also variables that can change from week to week.

“You are dealing with outdoor now, so the weather can be dramatically different,” Slekis said. “We had perfect weather at ULL. If we don’t get perfect weather at LSU, one of the things we talked about is you don’t get to decide the weather at the conference championships. At the ULL meet, some of our kids didn’t do as well in the 800 as they were hoping because the meet got delayed and they had to stand around for 30 minutes after their warmup.

“I wrote in the journals for one of the girls, what if we get a lightning delay at the conference meet? That’s 30 minutes. That’s not ideal for the race and it probably affected how you did, but it could have been happening at a championship where we have a lightning delay. That delay (at ULL) was because of timing issues.”

The goal is always to continue to improve heading toward the Southland Conference meet.

“We’re looking for more people to set more personal bests or at least like be able to focus on what they can do technically better. Obviously, there’s a few people it’s their first go at an event, so just getting the rust off in that event, if it’s the 400 hurdles and you haven’t done them yet, let’s have a good rep at that and just keep getting better for April.