Slekis trying to sell vision of track program that features on on-campus track

Trying to sell a college track program at a school that has no on-campus track is akin to trying to sell lakefront property in the desert.

If you are a Middle Eastern sheik, you can use your oil riches to create your own lake.

When you are Stefanie Slekis and dealing with much less financial resources, you need a different tactic.

Hired in 2017, Slekis is the head coach of the men’s and women’s cross country teams as well as the men’s and women’s track and field teams at Nicholls

A distance runner at Syracuse, Slekis earned her undergraduate degree from the Newhouse School of Public Relations.

“I think my background in PR is very helpful,” said Slekis. “PR is more than salesmanship. It’s more like figuring out what is your brand, what is your identity? What are your core values?

“For me, it’s kind of figuring out what do we have to offer at Nicholls.”

Slekis has gone about trying to build the Nicholls track brand first through cross country.

“Well, we don’t have a track. But remember, it’s cross country and track and field. I think one of the great things when (then Nicholls Athletic Director) Matt Roan hired me, he’d been at Eastern Kentucky where they are more of a cross country program first, even though they do have a track. The first thing I looked at is we need to have a home cross country meet. We might not have a track facility, but we want to have a venue.”

So, with her mile-a-minute, infectious enthusiasm, Slekis went ahead with trying to locate a venue.

At first, the school considered LaTour Golf Club in Mathews.

“There were just a lot (of) challenges. Obviously, it was farther away. I actually drove out there several times. They were really great and hospitable,” said Slekis.

It was at that point she received a suggestion from Jeremy Becker, the executive director of the Nicholls State University Foundation.

“We looked around at building a course out there (at LaTour) and that’s when Jeremy was like, ‘well, what about ‘The Farm’?” Slekis recalled.

The Nicholls Farm is a 277-acre farm three miles south of Nicholls’ campus and serves as an environmental research and education center for Nicholls and other partners. It consists of labs, classrooms, greenhouses, shade houses, storage barns, and a 7.5-acre pond for wetland plant production.

Slekis met an equally enthusiastic cohort in Quenton Fontenot, the head of the biology department at Nicholls.

“Dr. Fontenot did an aerial. He even mapped out what he thought could be a route,” Slekis remembered. “We went out there and we changed it from that.

“From that, it’s just grown every year and the outpouring has been huge. That was the first step.”

It allowed Nicholls to host a home event in track.

“We made a venue, let’s host a home meet. We can’t host a track meet, but we can host a cross country meet. I also knew we were going to host the conference championship. You have that on our rotation for conference cross country,” Slekis explained.

The annual Nicholls XC Invitational will be hosted at the Nicholls Farm for the fifth time on September 30.

The event has helped to build some forward momentum for the track program.

“We also built, thanks to our grounds department, our 1200-meter Bermuda grass track is out here behind the football facility. So that’s something keep mode for us where we measure it out and we use it in cross country. Our sprinters and stuff might use that in the fall a little bit for soft-surface training,” said Slekis.

The Nicholls program continues to use facilities at E.D. White and Thibodaux High, but now also has the use of the Wellness Center track at the Thibodaux Regional Heath Center, which is a javelin toss from the school’s campus.

“That’s been a huge upgrade,” Slekis said of the Wellness Center track.

Along with Slekis’ task of selling a track program without a track by strongly focusing on cross country, came another component.

“We really sell the academic side,” said Slekis. “We sell the one-on-one experience and that’s not only like from their coaching staff to the athlete, but it’s also like our departments. There’s an 18-to-1 ratio at Nicholls. So we’re just huge and academics.”

One of the most prominent academic programs helped guide some of Nicholls’ recent top track performers to the Thibodaux campus.

“Two of the best track women we’ve had in this program were nursing majors,” Slekis pointed out. “It was the reason Omo Oboh, who’s our school record holder now in short hurdles, graduated from nursing and was second in the conference.

“That was the big sell. She could have gone other places, but they wouldn’t let her major in nursing. That’s what we’ve kind of figured out our identity is. We are big on academics first.”

While not being confused with a track powerhouse, Nicholls has bolstered performance across the board, setting numerous all-time Top 10 marks.

That’s a far cry from the humble beginnings of Slekis’ first year as a college head coach at the Division I level in 2017.

“There was one distance girl on the team who originally walked on as a multi (event athlete) out of high school,” Slekis recalled.

The assortment of women’s performers also included a sorority girl who hadn’t run track since high school, a former volleyball player, and a former soccer player, an one player who had committed prior to Slekis’ arrival.

“That was our women’s team. A That’s what we started with. We only had five girls,” said Slekis.

The men’s teams were a whole other matter.

“The men’s team was an even rougher start. I think what’s exciting for our men’s team is just the growth in interest. I get emails now from guys that I couldn’t beg them onto the phone five years ago,” Slekis said. “A huge part of that was Matt Roan reinstating our men’s track and field program.”

Nicholls dropped men’s indoor track in 2002 and outdoor track in 2004 before reinstating the programs in 2019.

“He knew that would be a game changer and it definitely was,” said Slekis.

Another game changer would be the Southland Conference cross country title.

“I’m going to Year Seven and I really want to win,” Slekis said. “I think that’s one of things when I came here thinking we could win at least the women’s cross country title. That’s the one that we think we’re closest to.”