Nathan Haskins (pictured, right) was racing comfortably, tucked in the middle of the lead dozen runners in last fall's Atlantic Sun Championship in DeLand, Fla., flanked by Kennesaw State University teammates Nabil Hamid and Jaakko Nieminen.
The pack galloped toward the first mile, yards after which the open baseball fields of the Sperling Sports Complex funneled into a wooded, narrow trail. Establishing a strong posit ion up front before the trail, the Kennesaw runners knew, was vitally important.
They reached the first mile. Then the unexpected happened -- the pack parted, leaving an opening for anyone willing to take the lead. All three Kennesaw runners saw the moment, and simultaneously, silently, with no gesture of communication, they moved as one to the front.
For Haskins, the moment was the embodiment of the close bond the team had forged over that year through hundreds of miles training together, and it reaffirmed that Kennesaw was going after nothing less than a win at the conference championships. "It was a surreal moment," Haskins says. "A few runners went with us, but at that point we had established: 'If you're going to get us, it's going to be a dog fight at the end.'"
The Kennesaw men raced that day to their first A-Sun title, comfortably beating East Tennessee State just four years after leaving behind the successful ranks of NCAA Division II schools to join Division I. Hamid, a freshman, finished the 8K course third in 25:45, Nieminen and Haskins finished in the top 10, and longtime coach Stan Sims, who doubles as a part-time math teacher at Kennesaw, was honored for the first time as men's coach of the year.
"This team may be one of the most talented that I have ever coached," Sims said at the time. "This is the closest team that I've ever coached."
In the summer leading up to this fall's season, four of the potential top seven men's runners stayed on campus for the first time, meeting early in the morning at least five days a week to hammer training runs ahead of the oppressive Georgia heat and humidity.
For their part, Haskins and Hamid are reluctant to outright declare that the men will make it this year to Terre Haute, Ind., for the school's first appearance at the NCAA cross country championships. But the possibility remains strong, and Haskins is poised as the team's senior member to bring them as close as possible.
The men's team graduated just one of its top five runners and collectively returns with one more year of critical training and racing experience -- including familiarity with the intensity of a regional cross country race, which the teams hadn't been eligible to compete in until the 2009 season because of the mandatory four-year reclassification period associated with moving to Division I.
"I think we're going to get top four, which would set us up for an excellent chance at, perhaps, an at-large bid," Haskins says confidently, with a deep southern drawl.
That this group of runners can even begin to consider themselves in contention for a national bid is remarkable. The powerhouse Division I distance programs recruited none except Hamid, the team's leading runner. And before last year, all but one had never run a collegiate championship-length 10K cross country race.
Last year, in the teams' inaugural race at the NCAA South Region Championships in Tuscaloosa, Ala., the men finished eighth, meeting the goal they set early in the season, but far from a shot of advancing to nationals.
"I just told them, 'You're running for respect, running for your institution and yourselves,'" Sims recalls saying before the race. "'Today is our day. You're going to bring respect to yourselves. You're ready. Just get out there and leave it all on the course.'
The Kennesaw women didn't send a team, but senior Mackenzie Howe (pictured, right), one of two women representing the school at regionals, finished 18th last year as a junior, missing a national bid by just 25 seconds.
"We weren't used to running with teams like that," says Howe. "I ran the hardest I could and prepared like I should have, and I was just a little bit off ."
Howe perhaps stands as Kennesaw's best chance of sending an individual runner to the championships in Terre Haute. She ran 35:16.96 in the 10K outdoors, setting the A-Sun record, and concluded her season with a 20th-place finish at the NCAA Eastern Preliminary qualifier in Greensboro, N.C., in late May.
A new group of talented freshman women coming in from Georgia high schools offers hope for a promising future.
Indeed, recruiting has come easier as Kennesaw has slowly built its reputation, but the program struggled for a long time to attract talented runners. "We're getting kids in that are a lot faster," says Haskins, who is entering his fifth and final year racing while pursuing an MBA at Kennesaw. "We had five freshmen when I started. Now we have a group of four guys coming in, and they're all pretty much faster than we were. It's still not where it should be, but we're getting there."
David Poteet, one of the first Kennesaw cross country and track coaches, can attest to the challenges of building the program from almost nothing. He took over as the head cross country and track and field coach in 1985 after several seasons as an assistant. His annual budget: $8,000 for both the cross country and track teams.
Poteet bushwhacked trails throughout the campus -- home to about 5,000 students then, compared to today's 22,000 -- to host high school cross country meets, part of an effort to recruit locals to come run for the recently established program. The team also held a garage sale to raise money to cover expenses, which went toward helping send two of his runners to compete at NAIA cross country nationals.
"We set the tone that we could do something, that it wasn't a joke program, and that there were good things happening at Kennesaw," Poteet says. "It's hard to believe that was 25 years ago."
In 1992, Dr. Dave Waples, the school's athletic director since 1987, brought on Sims -- a full-time math teacher at the time -- as an assistant, and told the new coaches he wanted to take the team in a "different direction." Sims, who took over head coaching in 1994, offered that he could recruit his first team with students already enrolled at Kennesaw.
"What I offer is accountability," Sims says. "They (the athletes) don't care how much you know, they want to know how much you care. If they have any comments and input, we'll listen."
Sims' continued role as a math teacher -- today for continuing and adult education students -- makes him something of an anomaly among Division I coaches, most of whom are hired full-time to recruit, coach and train teams, not to juggle teaching duties as well.
His recruiting strategy is the natural consequence of leading a program that, for now, still doesn't have widespread name recognition. He works with nine men's and 12 women's scholarships, using them to attract the runners who show potential in high school, but may have been saddled with less than optimal coaching and otherwise underperformed. What's most important, he says in evaluating a recruit, is finding a willingness to run and work hard.
Sims acknowledges that recruiting during the transition period was difficult because his runners didn't have a chance to race in the regional meets until later in their careers. So he framed the program around winning conference championships -- a feat he had already handily achieved coaching in Division II. The men won consecutive conference championships in the Division II Peach Belt Conference from 1994-99, then again in 2001 and 2004. The women were crowned conference champions seven straight times from 1994-2000, then again in 2002 and 2004.
Now, the men's team is eyeing the powerhouse programs of Auburn, Alabama and Florida State, the schools that finished in the top three of the South Region last year. The top two teams in each of eight regions move on to Terre Haute, plus several teams selected on an at-large basis by an NCAA selection committee. Four more runners who aren't on qualifying teams make it to nationals as at-large individuals.
"If we beat Georgia and Tennessee, that's definitely a huge accomplishment for our program," Haskins says. "I feel like if we can put it all together, we can. It really comes down to who's training the hardest and smartest."
Best Running Shoes 2025.
"He has a tremendous amount of loyalty from the kids who are running for him," Waples says of Sims, "even though he's a tough guy to run for."
For four years during the transition, Kennesaw's cross country season ended at the conference meet. Now, the runners must be sharp enough to train and race at least two weeks later, then compete at longer distances -- bumping from 8K to 10K for the men, and 5K to 6K for the women.
Sims says both the men's and women's teams will race fewer times this year and start later -- mid-September -- because he senses he over-raced them last fall. Intervals will be longer for the men to ensure they have the strength to race 2,000 meters more, and of the meets they do race, the runners and schools will be much more competitive.
"If you run three or four 8Ks, and then you've got to finish up two 10Ks, you have to pick and choose your battles," Sims says.
Last November in Tuscaloosa, five of the top seven men set personal bests in the 10K. Haskins had raced himself to injury at the A-Sun championships, but laced up despite pain in his Achilles, hobbling in well off his best mark. All but one of the runners had never raced on a 10K cross country course before.
"It was a shock, and I think a few of us didn't run as wel l as we'l l do [this] year," Haskins says of last year's regional meet. "The end goal used to be to race well at conference, and you only had to be a certain talent. But no one cares whether you win conference. It's all about what you do at regionals.
"We'll have to beat some teams that are pretty amazing. But you have to set your goals high. If you set your goals high, you give yourself a chance of finishing high."
