We sat down and talked with coach Steve Keith, as the men and women's cross country teams travel to the Southeastern Conference Championships in Oxford, Miss., this weekend.
On conditions of the course
In September I drove over there to watch a race on an off weekend and it got flooded out. They had rain earlier this week. They're going to have significant rain tomorrow and tomorrow night. It's going to be pretty sloppy.
On how the Southeastern Conference Championships are like a final exam for Vanderbilt
You get graded not necessarily by what you do all season but what happens at the SEC meets. We've had serious focus on this, talking a lot individually and as a team about what we'll try to accomplish. In one respect, a race is a race, no different than the Belmont-VU opener. But this is one that you want to not have any surprises in and know what you're getting into so that you can try to have a little bit of control over your situation.
On which teams the Vanderbilt men are hoping to defeat
LSU, and if we try to match up ahead of LSU, that will put us close to Ole Miss. Ole Miss has a kid who can be top-five in the race, and that low number's going to be hard. We can't cover that low number because we're all back in that back-third.
On the difficulties of the men’s team being the SEC’s lone non-scholarship program
They're true student-athletes. They're not training any differently than if they were on scholarship or not on scholarship. You don't enter into this thing and just kind of do it, "half-assed." They approach their academics the same way. Either they're doing it 100 percent or they're not.
On the return of junior Rita Jorgensen to action
She surprised us at Pre-Nationals, had a nice effort there. She's had two more weeks of training, so physically should be in a good spot. Mentally, she was really strong at the Pre-Nationals as far as not having raced in quite a while. I look for her and Kristabel to really push each other and match up as a nice pair like they did last year.
On goals for the women’s team this weekend
Well, last year we scored 177 points and that was 30 points better than the year before. We remained in the same spot. I could see us, we're setting a goal to score under 150 points which could be another 30-point improvement. I don't know if that's going to move us up more than a couple teams. We could have a great race and finish fourth, or we could have a great race and still finish eighth. That's how close things are with Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, Kentucky and us.
On whether the weekend’s all business
You've got to be relaxed and treat it like a normal meet. The second you start doing all business, things start getting a bit tight. I think we'll have an interesting afternoon tomorrow when we run the course because it looks like it's going to be pouring down rain.
For the girls, we've got three recruiting groups in there and the freshmen are very happy that they've got two classes in front of them that they can follow. A couple years ago, the juniors, when they were freshmen, they were it and we were asking freshmen to be like upperclassmen. The progress they've made over the last three years we're continuing to see, but it's nice to have freshmen, sophomores and juniors all in the mix now and have had some experience, or three years experience, versus just a young group.
