LCC Cross Country begins a new season
By Carson Lemon
Staff Reporter
As the fall feeling settles in for many Lansing Community College students, the LCC Cross Country teams have begun their season. Going into the 2025-2026 season, the men’s team is defending their ninth national title, while the women strive to rank higher than their ninth-place finish last season.
Although the LCC teams officially begin their season in August, Cross Country Head Coach James Robinson gives his runners summer “homework” to get them prepared to jump right into the season. They had their first official practice for the 2025-2026 season on Monday, Aug 4.
For LCC runners, their training consists of shorter faster runs; longer, slower runs; and workouts alternated throughout the course of two weeks. “We follow a two-week cycle that includes a long run over the weekend. Monday and Wednesday are generally a base run, and that’s really the foundation of our training. For our women, they’re anywhere from six to ten miles and for the guys, they’re anywhere from eight to eleven miles. Tuesday and Friday are workouts.” Robinson said. “Workouts generally fall into three categories, tempo workouts, speed workouts, and then what I call race specific. That’s generally 5K race pace down to about what you could run for a two mile.”
On Friday, Aug 29, 2025, the LCC Men’s and Women’s Cross Country teams ran at the 2025 Jeff Drenth Memorial 5K, hosted by Central Michigan University in Shepard, MI. For the men’s team, Nate Carmody placed 12th, with a time of 15:07.70. Following close behind him was Logan Zahn, placing 20th with a time of 12:23.20. “Our men had probably the best day Lansing Cross Country has ever had at a 5K cross country race. Again, we’re running against D-1 schools that have fifth year runners. So, we’re going up against Michigan State, Western, Central, these are all NCAA Division 1 schools, so to have three runners on the first page of the men’s result list is pretty good. Nate had a great race; I suspect he ran the fastest 5K cross country time ever run by an LCC runner,” Robinson said.
On the women’s team, LCC struggled to place within the top 50, with Leah Shadduck in 54th with a time of 19:52.40. The next runner for the LCC women’s team to place was Kaylee Hovey in 71st place with a time of 20:32.30. “On the women’s side, again we’re going up against NCAA Division 1 schools, and when you factor that in, I thought we did pretty well. We have a pretty young team on the women’s side. Leah had [beat her] personal record by about 50 seconds, and it was similar for other runners—if it wasn’t a lifetime personal record, comparing the first race last year to [the first race of] this year, it was a huge improvement.” Robinson said.
This year, the men’s team is made up of 24 runners, 13 freshmen and 11 returning athletes.
Returning athletes are Nate Carmody, Jesse Carson, Conner Fountain, Lucas Hopkins, Aiden Janes, Ben March, Quaid Schimetz, Matthew Schrauben, Joey Schwindt, Evan Suydam, and Logan Zahn.
New to the team are Miingen Bertrand, Robert Donley, Joshua Howard, Landon Jayaraman, Riley Johnson, Conner McCormick, Evan Oosterhouse, Baron Pham, Jack Ryan, Ben Snook, Elias Valdez, Jaylen Wildman, and Robert Wilson.
As for the women’s team, they have a total of 10 runners, seven freshmen and three returning athletes. The returning athletes are Paige Kloha, Jalynn Schmelter, and Faith Swenor.
The 2025 freshmen runners consist of Kaylee Hovey, Bailey Meiring, Claudia Paksi, Ava Patterson, Leah Shadduck, Malayna Thompson, and Ava Vaccaro.
The next competition the LCC Cross Country teams will be attending is the Spartan Invite/ B1G Preview, hosted by Michigan State University on Friday, Sept 12, 2025, in East Lansing, MI.
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