Cross Country Squad Returns to Campus to Prepare for Season
Aug. 14, 2014
COLUMBIA, S.C. – With just over two weeks until the first meet of the season, the South Carolina cross country team returned to campus this week and went through its first training session as a team on Thursday morning.
“It’s actually good to be back and see everyone full of energy and everyone blending so well with 13 new folks,” assistant track coach for distance and cross country Andrew Allden said. “The one thing I was struck with during the eligibility meeting yesterday is that the distribution is much more on the younger side.”
With 27 athletes on his team this fall, 19 are sophomores or younger, including 13 freshmen coming from the Carolinas, Florida, Illinois and the Mid-Atlantic Region.
“Seeing that we have 13 freshmen in concrete form is both promising and daunting at the same time,” Allden noted.
“We do definitely have some mature leadership, but at the same time, we’re on the young side, which again I think is exciting, but it’s going to be interesting how we develop over the next couple of weeks.”
That leadership comes in the form of two of the team’s top upperclassmen in juniors Kayla Lampe and Anna Todd. Lampe, who redshirted in 2013, recorded the then-fastest 5K time in school history in 2012 at 17:10.20, and currently holds the school’s 6K record at 20:40.43. Todd was one of the top Gamecocks a season ago, winning the Gamecock Invitational #1 and setting a 5K personal best of 17:59.8 at the Royal Cross Country Challenge.
SEC All-Freshman Team honoree, Mary Reiser, returns as well. Last season she became the third freshman from South Carolina to be named to the conference’s All-Freshman Team, as she placed 33rd at the SEC Championships. Reiser set the fifth-fastest 5K time in school history at the Royal Cross Country Challenge at 17:39.0 and finished in the top 30 at the NCAA Southeast Regional.
Rather than starting back slowly, Allden wants to work aggressively right away to gauge where everyone is and how hard people worked during the summer.
“From my personal perspective, I do have a significant number of kids who went through a year with me personally, so they kind of know the system so it won’t be quite as dramatic even with all of the kids that will be new to my system. To me, it’s just folks mentoring each other, learning from the upperclassmen. It won’t be quite a system-wide change.”
The team will train during the next two weeks throughout Columbia in preparation for its first meet of the season at Hilton Field on Ft. Jackson on Aug. 30 with the Carolina Invitational.
