Freshman Tara Stuntz (above) finished in ninth place at the LSU Invitational with a time of 19 minutes, 20 seconds. She entered the team with a new wave of freshman.
Courtesy of Sports Information
Cross country is considered a sport that mixes in elements of team effort as well as individual performance. Assistant track and field coach Rocky Capello and four runners with the university cross country team took time to reflect over the season so far, what they hope to accomplish, and what the sport means to them.
Dutchtown native and freshman Tara Stuntz enjoys the team aspect of the sport.
“I like being in the nature part and enjoy running,” said Stuntz. “I really like being with the team and family that I can rely on, having that sportsmanship to where when I’m doing something, I’m being supported by others.”
Freshman Texas native Adam Cortez placed 2nd at the last two invitationals. Cortez stated that he enjoys the personal challenge that cross country presents to him.
“I think it’s really cool that even though you’re competing with other people, you’re really competing against yourself,” said Cortez. “Most of the time, you’re trying to figure out how tough you are and if you can handle running that fast for that long, so it’s a really good personal challenge.”
Originating from Georgia, sophomore Grant O’Callaghan has been running with the university since last year and compares his experiences from the high school version of the sport to the college level.
“College is very humbling compared to high school in a lot of ways because in high school you can be the best at your school real easily,” said O’Callaghan. “You think you’re at a really high level. Then once you get to college, there is so many guys who are better than you. You have to work that much harder to try and get up there with them, and also your teammates are a lot better than they were in high school and can push you more.”
Goal setting for each runner varies according to the individual’s approach to the season. Stuntz decided that she would not set an explicit goal but would rather see how far her potential could take her.
“I don’t set a certain time,” said Stuntz. “I just keep going up each time, so just depends on what time I hit, and I learn from that race what I can do better for the next race.”
Capello believes this season’s team is performing well because of the team members’ efforts.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the way that they’ve performed in practice,” said Capello. “Not only that, we’ve got quality kids, really smart kids, so they’re great inside of practice and outside of practice. And they’re excited, so the vibe on the team is better than I’ve ever seen it. So, everybody’s excited. Everybody’s happy. Everybody’s healthy. Everybody’s training hard. The race performances are showing it so I couldn’t be happier.”
Capello explained the way he approaches practices for the team.
“My system’s a little unusual, I guess,” said Capello. “It’s not a typical cross country regiment. I do some things that they’ve never seen before, so I didn’t know how long it would take them to catch on. They’ve caught on amazingly.”
Cortez described how the team seems to be performing exceptionally during practice and is optimistic that this will translate over into their performance throughout the season.
“From a practice perspective, I would say it’s gone about close to perfect as you can get in the real world because every day at practice we seem to be having our best practice ever and everybody’s getting faster,” said Cortez. “We’re all at practice, so from a practice perspective, we’ve been doing amazing. So hopefully, we can translate that into the meets in the next coming weeks.”
O’Callaghan agreed with Cortez, praising both the performances of the new runners as well as the veteran ones.
“Everyone’s been on fire at practice,” said O’Callaghan. “Every workout, people are just doing crazy stuff. The freshmen are just killing it, and the returners are also doing a really good job building off of what they did last year. The first meet, we still had a pretty good showing, better than we’ve ever had before, so it’s looking really good right now.”
Capello estimated that the team will be able to successfully win the conference title.
“Southeastern’s never been ranked before,” said Capello. “We’re the third ranked team in the conference. Right now, it looks like we have a pretty good shot to meet our goals. Not impossible for us to win a conference championship. That’s never been done before. From what I’ve been told, the highest we’ve ever finished in the Southland conference is sixth, so it looks like this may be the best team we’ve had at least in the last 20 or 30 years. And it’s a really young team. So if you look at our squad, it’s mostly freshmen and sophomores. The next few years ought to be exciting.”
Capello believes cross country is different from any other sport as it relies heavily on individual performance in a more unique way than other team sports.
“Each individual athlete on the team is an individual team, and they have to want to perform their best,” said Capello. “Whether they feel good or not, they have to want to do their best as an individual. And then their individual accomplishment will determine how well the team does. So, we preach to them how important the team is, but the team is important based upon how they do as that individual with nothing else really involved so they’re not really relying on the other person so much in the race to determine how well they do as an individual. It’s all on them.”