Nicholls cross country teams conclude season with NCAA South Central Regional meet

The Nicholls cross country team close out the season in the NCAA South Central Regional meet Fridy in Fayetteville, Ark.

Nicholls goes into the event two weeks after competing in the Southland Conference Cross Country Championships held in San Antonio.

The Nicholls women had four runners place in the top 50 in the 6k event. Sophia Harrison led the way for the Colonels in a time of 23.27.5 to place 29th. Kassidy Besson was 36th, Maria Nikolaou 37th, and Issy Rivault 41st.

Three members of the men’s team finished in the top 50 while competing in the 8K event. Lucas Futey, with a time of 28:10.3 finished in 45th place. Goran Duijsters was 46th, and Avery Morgan 47th.

“They are really excited to go into the regional meet,” Nicholls coach Stefanie Slekis said of the women’s team. “I think the men are as well. The men move up to 10k. We talk about it all year, training for 10k and then only racing 8k. They do have some younger guys in that group. We’ve got several freshmen and sophomores running. For some of them, it will be the first 10k in their life.”

The Southland Conference meet featured adverse conditions.

Days of rain left the course in a muddy condition. As the women started to run, there was heavy rain. The rain stopped in time for the men’s race, but mud, heat, and humidity contributed to the outcomes.

“We knew it was going to be muddy,” Slekis said. “The day before we previewed the course. I’m on the games committee this year so we kind of talked to Derek (Riedel), who was hosting from Incarnate Word about what they were doing to try to make the course a little bit more manageable for all the teams competing. They put down a ton of mulch between the preview and the actual event.

“Up front, people still ran a little bit fast. When you see adverse conditions it’s like it really slows down the middle of the field. That’s what I see. You will see the top individual or a couple still run pretty fast and be competitive, but it really slows down the rest of the race.”

The conditions, Slekis said, altered expectations.

“Once we previewed the course and realized how wet it was, we just kind of looked back and said as a team let’s just set place goals,” the Nicholls coach said. “The times are kind of out the window, and looking more as a team, what was our ultimate goal for the day in terms of how many points we thought we could score on the lowest end, maybe realistic what we thought we were go into scoring, and what we scored in the past.

“Then the men and the women kind of set their goals based off of that, kind of knowing where our breaks are. If our first runner can place here. On a great day it might be 20th, on a realistic day they are 30th, on a bad day they are 40th. What does that add up to our team score for one (first finisher) through five.”

The women added another goal.

“The women, we also in a separate meeting, we talked about we’re seventh on paper,” Slekis said. “We didn’t think there was a way Commerce, Southeastern, or Northwestern State were beating us.

“I kind of said to them, ‘we’re all new.’ We had two newcomers and five freshmen. I said, ‘we can go and run a conservative race for seventh because that’s what we are on paper, but I think we should go out and run an aggressive race and we might be a Top 5 team.’”

Two weeks prior to the Southland meet, Nicholls competed in the Arturo Barrios meet hosted by Texas A&M. That much larger meet likely served as a better rehearsal for the regional meet than the SLC outing, according to Slekis.

“The A&M meet kind of prepares you for this regional meet. The conference championships are a smaller kind of invitational feeling versus this giant invitational feeling at the regional and national meet,” she said.

A total of 10 teams took part in the Southland meet. Approximately 25 teams are expected to participate in the South Central Regional, one of nine regionals across the country.

“Everyone can go to their respective region,” said Slekis. “Your coach has to choose to bring you. There is no entry fee. We pay an entry fee for other season meets. We don’t pay an entry fee. The NCAA covers all of it.

“We always look at it as a great learning opportunity. Even with a younger team, or we didn’t have the best day in conference, we don’t go, ‘oh, we weren’t very good, we’re not going to go.’ We look at it as we’re training for two championships,” Slekis said.

The regional, said Slekis, allows the men to run a longer 10k race. For the women, it allows for a chance to improve upon their performance at the conference meet.

“For our program, that’s been the thing since Year One for me. We are going to go,” she said. “Even in a year when we’re not as good, we’re going to score as a team and go and compete and see where we rank in the region.

“The women, they left the conference meet going, ‘well, it wasn’t the day we wanted to have but I still think I can run really well. I get another shot at the regional meet.’”

In track circles, the Nicholls coach has picked up the nickname “Psychic Slekis” for her ability to mock out meet results.

“With me doing the regional rankings for so long with the men and now I vote in the national poll, especially when I was doing regional rankings, I would cross compare opponents and look at things to try to mock out what you thought the meet would look like to your rankings,” she explained. “I’m just big into that.

“It helps me be more knowledgeable when I am setting goals for my athletes to say, ‘hey, I think you’re this on paper, but we’ve been doing this in training, how can you move up and run up a few spots from what we’re predicted to do?’

The Psychic Slekis moniker was given to her by a broadcaster during a cross country event.

“No one had ever used that exact phrasing before. Kalin Baratka she’s told me before, ‘Coach, it’s always so crazy how you predict my finish.’ I said, ‘well, is that a bad thing?’ Am I holding her back, or is it more I’m pretty accurate at saying, ‘I think you are really going to finish 18th at the LSU meet, and she ends up finishing 19th or 17th, she’ll finish that close.”

The Nicholls coach said she has not mocked out the regional meet.

“I think if I were to mock it out, I would start it off with the Arturo Barrios meet. That was a while ago. It would be a lot of work. It’s a lot easier to do the conference one because there’s just 10 teams. What I do is just pull times and results and just cross compare,” said Slekis.

What about the goals for her team for her team in the regional meet?

“I think for our team, in a great year we want to be a Top 15 team. On a good year, 20-25, in that range,” Slekis said. “I think we are just looking to go and run better than we ran in the conference meet. How close can we get to Incarnate Word? I don’t know if Houston Christian will score as a team. They might just run four, I would guess. How close can we be to them.”

“I think we will look at some of the Sun Belt schools that will be there. Hopefully, they bring full teams like Louisiana-Lafayette, ULM, those are teams that finished similar in the Sun Belt to how we finished in the Southland. How we run with those teams is what we will look at.”