BATON ROUGE — The LSU cross country team will travel to College Station, Texas on Saturday to compete in the NCAA South Central Regional Championships hosted by Texas A&M. At stake will be individual and team berths to the NCAA Championships on Nov. 19.
The men will start with a 10-kilometer race at 9 a.m., while the women will follow with a 6k race at 10 a.m. The top two teams in each of the six regionals across the country and the top four individual finishers not on qualifying teams receive automatic bids to the NCAA Championships. An additional 13 teams and two individual runners will receive at-large bids.
LSU enters the South Central Regional unranked in either regional poll. Still, head coach Mark Elliott is optimistic that his squads can put together a productive outing.
“We’re going with two full teams and our goal is to be very competitive and possibly find a way to make our first team appearance in the NCAA Championships,” said Elliott. “Realistically, our best chance to advance to nationals is on an individual level with Likhaya Dayile on the men’s team and Susanne Strunz on the women’s team.”
Dayile, a fifth place finisher at the SEC Championships on Oct. 29, was a 2000 NCAA qualifier and will try and become only the second man in LSU history to make consecutive NCAA Championship fields. Dayile finished third at the NCAA South Central Regional a year ago and leads the Tigers in a tough region that includes Arkansas, Texas A&M and Texas.
Like Dayile, Strunz also finished fifth at the SEC Championships and will try to become only the second woman in LSU history to make the individual field at the NCAA Championships. Strunz will attempt to be the first LSU woman since Charlotte Mayock in 1996 to make the NCAA Championship field.
The Tigers finished sixth in the team competition a year ago, narrowly missing an at-large bid in their best finish ever, while the Lady Tigers finished 12th.