Written By: Austin Wells

For the first time in over a decade, VSU will be holding a cross country meet this Saturday at 8 a.m., and the runners look to improve off a 5^th out of 13 Men’s finish and a 3^rd out of 13 Women’s finish from their first meet last Saturday.

Although both are good finishes, sophomore runner, Joshua Hall, feels they can do even better this weekend.

“We can win this next meet hands down,” said Hall. “We definitely could’ve placed higher in that first meet, but with a lot of freshmen, we didn’t really have any experience running 8K’s. Now that we know kind of what to expect in races and how to race, every race from here on out should be better than that one.”

One of the freshmen runners, Tony Rowden, agrees that he’ll perform better this time around. “I’ll definitely do better in this meet,” said Rowden. “It was kind of like a practice run the first time. I didn’t really know what to expect, but now that I know what to expect I can pace myself better and where I need to pick it up at.”

With eight freshmen, including Rowden, on the men’s team and seven on the women’s team, improvement from the young runners will be the key to success in this Saturday’s meet.

Hall also gave a lot of praise to head coach Clinton Bell for what he has done with the team.

“He’s reinventing the program,” said Hall. “He’s doing a bunch of things that haven’t happened in a while for VSU. Everything he’s doing is pretty much unprecedented. We’re excited to see how everything goes from here.”

With Coach Bell improving the team and the freshmen runners learning from their first time, this Saturday’s meet should be quite a successful one for the team.