Cross Country Talks With Media at Fall Olympic Sports Media Day

Aug. 25, 2010

LAWRENCE, Kan. –

Redwine’s opening comments

A. Miller talks with the media

Stanley Redwine, Cross Country/ Track and Field Head Coach

On the coming season:

“We are definitely looking forward to this season on both the men’s and the women’s side. We lost some key players that did well last year on the women’s side. But our men’s side this year, we are led by Donny Wasinger, and he has had a phenomenal summer. I think he has done a really good job of leading the team so far. We have an opportunity to compete on Sept. 4 and we will see where the team is at that point compared to our competition, but we have been training well and looking forward to doing well. The guys are motivated and ready to go. We have a lot of freshmen on our men’s side who I think are really excited about stepping up and filling the gap and having the opportunity to contribute and make sure everything is being done on their behalf.”

On last season:

“We were eighth on the men’s side last year at our conference meet, and we want to do better. In order to be better, we have to have a better summer. We have to have more intense workouts and I think that has happened and it is evident by some of the things we have done so far. On the women’s side, I can’t say we don’t have experience. We lost Lauren Bonds, who you would think was hard to replace. She was an NCAA qualifier. But what she has done, she showed and gave us an example that it can be done. That is the goal on both the men’s and women’s side is to get to the NCAA and we are definitely excited about that.”

On recent training conditions:

“I think first of all it was an opportunity for us to all wake up early and make sure we train early in the morning so that we don’t have any health or heat related issues. The athletes are training well, and they are training tough. They have been doing two-a-days. Right now our goal is holding them back because we want to avoid any injuries at the end of the season.”

Cross country senior Amanda Miller

On the preseason:

“The thing about cross country is that it’s an all year thing. You have to train all day, every day of the year. You need to run every day in the summer maybe twice a day. Working in the weight room, which for cross country isn’t that intense, but it does make a difference. We threw a few tempos in sometimes where maybe once a week we’ll run a little faster.”

On improvements for this coming season:

“I think we’re going to have a really good pack. Last year and the years previous we’ve had two or three people that have been up there and then we’d have a big gap between our fourth through seventh runners. This year we’re going to have a lot of people switching off and helping each other out.”

On personal goals:

“As a senior I just want to have success as a team. Personally I want to help the team out whether it is by example or mentoring the other girls that might need help.”

Cross country junior Donny Wasinger

On improvements from the past year:

“Well we only lost one or two scorers from last year so we’re a pretty strong team and have a strong core of guys that worked out really well during the summer and are excited to get racing again. We’ve got a lot of freshmen on the team that will have an opportunity to show what they have. So I think a major improvement is the recruiting class. We had one freshman last year and we have nine this year.”

On the new freshmen:

“I’m sure a few of them will step up and surprise us. We’re pretty open minded right now. There’s always an amount of expectation, but we don’t want anyone to get hurt so we try not to push them too hard.”

On preparing for the season:

“We ran all summer, we had a guy running in Colorado and I ran here in Lawrence. We had a lot of guys working out. We were communicating all summer and talking about what all we’ve been doing, and just stayed disciplined all summer.”

On the effects of the heat:

“Well the heat has been a challenge for sure. If you wanted to run during the day you’re pretty much just out of luck. You have to run at nine or ten o’clock at night or six o’clock in the morning. Overall it was still a good summer for running. It didn’t bring down my mileage. We just found a way to get it done, because without it you are just out of luck.”